Eric D Johnson’s 11th album as Fruit Bats finds him reminiscing on the past – festivals played twenty years ago, girls that were once fiercely loved and are now just memories, times when he was poor. He’s less poor now, he says, but he’ll be poor again some day. Life is a series of choices and the change that comes along with them, and by the end of Baby Man it should be clear that all you can do is weather them, and see where they take you.

The second of two albums from rising indie pop group Men I Trust, Equus Caballus was the one that distilled everything that has thus far made the group great into one stellar demonstration album. With synths and production nabbed in great part from the best slabs of ’80s pop, and Emma Proulx’s vocals threading through each song as a unifying taste that is both necessary and sweet, the album feels like a best-of compilation for a great lost synth band.

Sunbather, Deafheaven’s legendary 2013 debut, reminded everyone that black metal is just shoegaze at its heart, and in doing so earned the enmity of the entirety of the trve cvlt scene. The group have been here and there since then – moving closer with each release to a smoother, more rounded heavy rock sound – but have never quite come close to equaling their first album. Until Lonely People With Power, that is. On their latest album, the group come back around to embrace that grimy intersection between black metal and shoegaze, and in doing so dig up the memory of their past. It’s a more mature version of that sound, though, one that speaks to a group that has gone through the wringer and come out whole on the other side.

There hasn’t been an FKA Twigs album since Magdalene. In between then and now, there’s been a whole plague, pop girl wars, and the Brat Summer. FKA Twigs return was both needed and awaited, a prophesized new album from an artist who blended the pop world and the art world in a manner that felt entirely effortless. Like Fiona Apple before her, FKA Twigs is developing into the sort of artist where every album is an Event; Eusexua demonstrates fully why she’s attained that level.

American black metal was once something considered ridiculous. Pure black metal, that trve cvlt stuff, came out of the parts of northern Europe where the sun rarely shone. Wolves In The Throne Room set this on a different trajectory, followed by a number of bands that cvltists typically deride as hipster-derived. Agriculture are from Los Angeles, which is the exact opposite of where the original black metal bands came from. Despite this, The Spiritual Sound is firmly set in the stone of blackgaze, like Deafheaven, where black metal and shoegaze meet. Maybe that’s the thing about sunny-weather black metal – it gets much hazier than its European brethren. What sets Agriculture apart here, though, is that they lean much more into traditional metal moves than their admittedly more hipster contemporaries. The first half hits like a hurricane-force wind, shattering you and leaving you drooling on the floor. The other half leaves you to slowly put yourself back together, coming through to the other side of inward contemplation. Together, it might just cure you.

English post-punk revivalism has certainly entered its difficult phase. When Squid arrived in 2021 they signaled a squalling anticommercial bent that still, somehow, managed to be weirdly catchy. With bands like BC, NR and shame trying to fit into more pop-friendly molds, it would be easy enough for Squid to carve off their more abrasive moments and reach for the radio. It would probably sound like if Thank were less meanly funny. That they carved off their more abrasive moments in service of something even more staunchly anticommercial is notable in itself. Unlike Bright Green Field, and only partially like O Monolith, Cowards spends a great deal of time burrowing down into itself. Dynamics are more narrowly defined, and there are times where it’s repetitions butt up against no wave. When it came out it was well-received, but its presence in the year-end lists was much more muted. Proving, as usual, that most critics are

The Toronto punk band got concept albums out of the way on their last album, paving the way for a looser, more free-ranging PUP. That’s not to say the band isn’t expounding on their favourite themes here, of course. Like most of their albums, Who Will Look After The Dogs is haunted by death and its adjacent thoughts. This should come as no surprise; Morbid Stuff was exactly that, and the heady concept of The Unraveling of PUPTHEBAND was that, specifically about the death of a band. Here, it’s inescapable: the realization that you haven’t been to an Olive Garden with someone since their grandma died; wanting to set the world alight except for one specific person; the death by a thousand cuts that comes from the final days of a relationship that should have died a while ago. It’s morbid, as per usual, but in the sense of any true momento mori, it will have you thinking long and hard about life instead.

Alabaster DePlume often comes off like the jazzed-out version of Russell Brand’s character in Forgetting Sarah Marshall – all pretentious pronouncements and tiresome word salads. The thing about DePlume, though, is that he’s utterly sincere about all of it, and if you listen too long you’ll end up being sincere about it as well. The spoken word passages might not be for everyone, but it’s hard to deny the power of the orchestration DePlume works up, especially when his saxophone penetrates the wall of sound to punctuate your existence.

The passing of Mimi Parker was devastating for everyone, but likely most of all for her husband and decades-long creative partner, Alan Sparhawk. In the aftermath of her death, fellow Duluth musicians Trampled By Turtles invited Sparhawk to go out on tour with them, under the idea that it would be best to be around friends you could lean on when things got dark. The pairing worked well, and in the winter of ’24 they got together in the studio to hash out some songs Sparhawk had kicking around. The result isn’t quite Low, but it’s the best that you’re likely to get now. Trampled By Turtles accentuate Sparhawk’s warm, familiar songwriting, turning songs like “Don’t Take Your Light” into a rough, ready version of what Low had been, mournful but shot through with love.

The Wand frontman has made a name for himself as a wide-open-skies psych songwriter, with albums like Pale Horse Rider and Western Cum showing his strengths as a purveyor of California desert folk tunes. I Love People diversifies his offerings, branching out into ’70s singer-songwriter sounds beyond just Neil Young and company. Alongside this he steps up his writing to a more freewheeling misanthropy, finding the charm in situations just as often as they cultivate his distaste and disgust for the people he sarcastically claims to love in the title.

Released on Halloween, the latest from Florence Welch and Company conjures up the hoary old Season of the Witch to deliver dark magic upon the world. She’s always been two things, bombastic and frank, and she delivers both in large amounts on Everybody Scream. It’s goth as hell but also deeply feminist, suspicious of male rock stars and at one point griping that it must be nice to be a man, and to be able to get away with churning out boring music. Florence + The Machine could be accused of being many things, but being boring is not one of them. Everybody Scream is a burst of autumn nighttime wind, redolent with burning candles and pumpkins, the peak of witchery in 2025.

As the frontman of the Hold Steady, Craig Finn has made a career of writing songs about hardcore kids, the hardcore scene, and the way that youth often bleeds into loss as you grow up and realize that those magic nights will always get subsumed by the drudgeries of work, heartache, and the accumulations of abuse. His solo work has taken a different path on the same themes, putting new faces to those old situations. Always Been is the pinnacle of that work, putting forth faithless priests, down-and-out brothers, and kids with a lot of secrets they’re dying to keep. There’s tragedy and hope in equal measures, although as usual tragedy tends to win out in the end. It’s biting songwriter stuff, and in that sense it’s probably no surprise that the cover is an homage to Randy Newman’s Little Criminals, another songwriter whose character studies often delve into the tragedy of daily life.

Daniel Lopatin has spent years trying to recapture the magic he first displayed on Replica and R Plus Seven. Those albums, the perfect conjunction of ambient and electronica, marked Lopatin out as perhaps the finest producer of his generation. Then he lost his way, putting out albums that ranged from good, if not excellent, to the merely okay. Tranquilizer, released in the final weeks of the year, is immediately better than anything he’s put out since R Plus Seven. The crux of the recording is a set of commercial sample CDs that Lopatin recovered from the Internet Archive during the pandemic. He found them, lost them, and then found them again. That sense of impermanence became the foundation of Tranquilizer, a record obsessed with fleeting sound snippets that swell upward and then disappear back into the cosmic background. It’s the perfect soundtrack for a world where everything can be said and everything is available, but often only for a limited time before accounts are shuttered, takedown notices are issued, and something new arises to paper over what came before.

Mike Hadreas has always been a student of the stridently pop; using his ethereal voice as an anchor, he’s explored a swampy mixture of soul, R&B, electronic, and indie rock seemingly at will, changing form and function with every album but keeping just enough of himself exposed to be recognizable. Glory is his most grounded album to date, delving deeper into indie rock and its adjacent balladry more than any previous Perfume Genius work. “It’s A Mirror” works the radio as a genius single; “No Front Teeth” channels the most muscular moments of The Who. With these as its intro, the bright, airy spaces the record explores afterward provide the perfect backdrop for sonic exploration. Despite themes of wanting to hide from the world post-covid, it’s the most expansive and welcoming Perfume Genius record yet.

Someday, in the far future (or perhaps not so far), human beings might defeat aging once and for all. Or maybe not; entropy is a key feature of the universe, all organic things being subject to decay over time. As the man once said, on a long enough timeline the survival rate of anything drops to zero. In the meantime, though, there is plenty of room to love, to cherish, to experience. Dan’s Boogie is a rumination on aging from a master libertine, the poet laureate of the elder millennial set. “To have loved and lost,” he tells us, “Is the same thing as nothing at all.” Everybody loses everything in the end, and far from being a morose reflection, it’s a maxim that’s incredibly freeing. You don’t have to spend your entire life dwelling on loss and death when you and everyone else will experience it eventually. You can spend your time enjoying the present instead, and being present in it.

In our final Hounds of Love Move entry of the year, we have experimental artist Anna Von Hausswolff. Von Hausswolff last did something approximating popular music around 2012’s Ceremony. Since then she spent some time perfecting an idea that was basically “what if doom metal but with church organs” and then doubling down on this further with “what if SunnO))) but with pipe organs.” When her voice appears on the stretched-out “Facing Atlas,” then, followed by a simple four-on-the-floor kick drum beat, it’s a revelation. Having gone through the grinding no-time of hell, she comes through into a full circle. She’s back into her goth pop mode – attuned, perhaps, to the same atmospheric signals as Florence Welch – but armed with all of the lessons of her decade of organ experiments. These songs are gigantic, cosmic pop music whose expansive freedoms were hinted at decades ago by the likes of Kate Bush and Annie Haslem. Call it prog goth if you want, but ICONOCLASTS is really in a class of its own: soaring and falling simultaneously, an act of astral forgiveness for the sins of the year.

OK maybe one more: 2025 was the year that English jazz bandleader and trumpeter Emma-Jean Thackray moved more into a hip hop and funk idiom. Her last album, Yellow, was a late-’70s jazz record recast in the lens of hip hop. Weirdo takes her trumpet out of the equation almost entirely, opting instead to trade in low end heroics, relentless rhythms, and a thick layer of Minimoog and sousaphone. Laced throughout is dark modern paranoia: wanting to bed rot from depression and grief, staying inside to eat fried rice rather than go out with friends, and wondering what the great final darkness might be like, and what’s keeping you from finding out. Now consider that she does all of the above on her own: written, performed, mixed, produced, and arranged in her apartment.

It’s become actually problematic to say it lately because some have become a little too florid in pronouncing it, but: Karly Hartzman is basically Faulkner with a guitar. That doesn’t mean anything, however, other than what it says plainly: Hartzman writes detailed and evocative Southern Gothics with loud, grungy guitars, counterbalanced by the band’s Carolina alt-country sensibilities. The result can be as varied as the sweet, uneasy ballad “Elderberry Wine,” the rollicking jam rock of “Phish Pepsi,” and the crushing shoegaze intensity of “Wasp” or “Candy Breath.” The duo of Hartzman and guitarist M.J. Lenderman has always been central to the band; their breakup in a Tokyo bar after most of these songs were written puts a big question mark on the band’s future, so Bleeds becomes doubly important as a record of this band, at this moment.

One fun Wednesday story for the year, though: I was at a punk rock flea market in downtown London, Ontario in the summer. My favourite local record store had a booth and they had a copy of Bleeds, which I finally decided to lay down money for. Three booths down I saw my wife was speaking to the vendor and paused outside to check out what art was being sold. Something seemed, uh, familiar about it and then it hit me: it was the booth for the artist of the piece that graces the cover of Bleeds, Kamila Mlynarczyk. I walked up to the conversation and slid the album out of the bag. Mlynarczyk gasped and said that they hadn’t even sent her a copy of it yet, and if she could see it. I bought a couple of prints and a book, because honestly how often does that sort of serendipity happen?

Horror is big business in 2025. There are people on Twitter right now claiming that Sinners should get a Best Picture nom, and films like The Substance, Weapons, and a Boyle/Garland reunion for 28 Years Later have received major audiences and buzz over the last couple of years. There’s always been a certain layer of the horrifying in billy woods’ music, though; this is less trying to genre chase than it is the rest of the world finally coming around into alignment. His music has always been full of unquiet ghosts, colonial genocides, and ripe American decay. On Golliwog he makes it explicit, though. Monsters mix with existential horror. A succubus sucks life from the nighttime scene; a family is evicted right before Christmas and their neighbours wait a moment before picking their leftovers apart; post-Berlin Treaty African states are recast as zombies and set to shamble in terrifying half-life. The world is a haunted house, and the monsters that lurk within it are all aligned alongside the capitalist power structure. We are all ghosts trapped in it, jockeying viciously for release.

A consensus pick so widespread that it borders on feeling basic. It’s the #1 album for BPM, Clash, Far Out, the NME, Stereogum, the goddamn New York Times, the New Yorker, and TIME, alongside probably a lot of others. It’s a top 10 in even more. Cameron Winter was parodied on SNL. It’s such a widely-held opinion that this album is brilliant that it’s hard to wrap your head around the fact that on Labor Day this album didn’t exist. In three months it’s stolen its way into you and written itself into your cells. Getting Killed got scratched into our souls.

The inestimable Holly Hazelwood once opined that Geese is inevitable. They’re going to show up when you talk about music from this year, whether you think they’re the latest sea change in rock ‘n’ roll or merely overrated indie tripe. I reviewed Porto, their 2021 album, semi-favorably, thinking it sounded like a second rate version of the post-punk revivalism that was going around at the time. I thought that 3D Country was at least interesting, even if it did largely just sound like Julian Casablancas fronting Grand Funk Railroad. Getting Killed, however, is fascinating: there’s still a ghost of that in there, but it’s as though Casablancas were doing Dylan – or, importantly, the other way around. Cameron Winter’s voice drones, warps, curls itself around the music and holds on for dear life. It absolutely should not be catchy, but there is no part of Getting Killed that won’t take up residence in your head. If you wallow in it long enough, you’ll wake up singing snatches of “Cobras,” “Taxes,” or “Half Real.” The Biblical references – the angels so deep undercover they sit on Solomon’s throne – clash with the changes from sailor to boat, green boats, green coats, the horses everywhere, Charlemagne lost on a bus, the silence for four and a half days. There’s no explicit meaning but at the same time moving from a straightforward line like “You should be ashamed” to an oblique statement like “You should be shame’s only daughter” is like scratching a maddening itch. It means everything, even if you can’t articulate it. It’s like the music itself, a ragged impression of classic rock that, improbably, you can dance to. That only makes sense, though; there is, after all, only dance music in times of war.

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