My 25 favorite songs of 2025 so far
I did in fact put my headphones on
This probably should have been sent out on June 30th or whatever but a) deadlines are a tool of the patriarchy and b) god wanted me to wait until the new excellent new Geese single came out, which was today (really fucking cool video as well, wait til 1:33, I love art!!).
I put it all on a playlist for you a well.
In no particular order:
As a beautiful and cool Gen Z girl pointed out to me at the Cameron Winter show back in December, I came to Geese backwards via Winter (I only recently learned they have a keytar player? So cool), but does it really matter how you end up in the right place as long as you get there eventually? I can’t help but contextualize this song through the lens of Heavy Metal but to my ears (and more importantly to my soul) it has that same spiritual quality and even though it starts with my man Cammy bleating “I should burn in hell” it has this uplifting, bittersweet, nagging, joyful, Talking Heads this might be the fucking place thing going on that absolutely shakes me down. To me, this is worship music. I will break my own heart indeed.
truck violence “Undressed you layn’t before”
This band has listened to Fugazi (compliment). There’s an intellectualism here that I am a sucker for (I too read books) but also a desperation and naked emotion (also my bag) and the twain meeting over post-hardcore punky sludge is very fine indeed. Like babe -these lyrics?
When I’m reading my favorite books
I can't help but feel inadequate like
I’ll never be interesting enough to have a collection of prose written about me and
Ultimately that’s my goal
To be written about
(Same).
You already know how I feel about crushed (gif of guy in Love Actually silently holding up the sign at Keira Knightley’s door). I won’t lie I was a little apprehensive about what was to come from them after their insanely good 2024 EP extra life but I needn’t have worried as my guys have absolutely delivered with “Starburn.” I always told Shaun Durkan that crushed songs feel cinematic to me (lazy word but it is the right one okay) and this song is like a little film, several acts in four minutes and change, a really great bass line, and Bre Morell’s gorgeous voice slipping perfectly into little well-placed harmonies with Durkan (again when I say things like “well-placed harmonies” I am doing theater I don’t totally know what that means).
Sabrina Teitelbaum aka Blondshell showed me this artist last year, and I’ve been fully bought in on her stock ever since. She has the kind of voice that makes people say things like “honeyed” or “chanteuse” - to me it’s just really earthy and sensual (gross sorry). I think it’s really hard to make actually sexy music - not corny or over the top or porny or whatever, but libidinal music that invokes a real sense of pleasure-seeking, and she really nailed that with this song. It is absolutely no surprise to me that she is a Taurus.
Most days I want to throw my expensive cellular phone into the ocean because I’m fairly certain I could have written two novels and a screenplay in the time I’ve devoted to vigilantly taking in a “this is not your life” style slideshow in order to avoid my own thoughts and feelings, consumed at such a rate and speed that it’s tantamount to self-inflicted subliminal messaging, but the other day my aimless lurking led to me to this song, which I’ve not heard of anywhere else and I quite love. It lives next door to dream pop (plenty of gossamer chime-y stuff happening) but it’s a little sturdier and more driving than that. I love the singer Alyssa Miller’s pretty, disaffected hot girl voice; it works great delivering lyrics like I hate when you ask/How I’m doing/When you already know. I also like that this song could have been shorter but then they were like actually what if we make it four full minutes long and more complicated and interesting than you were expecting. I like it! Looking forward to lurking them more. (I too am building up to a breakdown).
Man this bitch always gets me with her perfect choruses. What, like I’m not going to put this on, roll the car windows down, and belt it out? Catch me in these streets on the way to Brandy Melville (beep beep) like “Letting him innnnnn why don't the good ones love meeeeee?” I think Sabrina is one of the sharpest lyricists out there right now. A lot of the girlies are doing 90s but they’re missing one of the core ingredients - vulnerability. I think people look back at the 90s and only see some post-irony detached I don’t care man shit but really it’s the wound that carries you through. Though I wish I related to this one less and more to…
The thing about Blondshell is she can do the corroded heart pain porn music so well but she can also put on her Lilith Fair hat (big brim babe), strap on the acoustic, and deliver her version (thematically more than sonically) of Alanis’ “Head Over Feet.” She’s just as good at writing to heartbreak as she is at writing to the far less discussed difficulties in actually accepting good, safe, healthy love. So yes there are two Blondshell songs on this list because guess what no gods no masters on the Substack honey.
God I love this song. Just soaring, jangly, emotionally-emptying, gutting-ass power pop. 10/10.
I wrote about post-Imperial Phase work and why I love this song here.
I can’t totally tell if I actually love this song, or I just love the pink hair lush Iceland landscape beautiful horse situation in the music video, or I just really love Addison Rae’s whole joie de vivre thing, but you know what? Who cares!
I went to a 2hollis show at The Echo last year and it felt like going to a punk show when I was 15, not for me, but for the sweaty thrilled teenage throng singing every word. I like taking a break from shaking my old man fist at the clouds to be reminded that the ability to make every aspect of your music from your bedroom and then promote it with your own visual identity and then take the stage alone with a backing track, a stacatto dance, and a dream, is kind of the punk we always dreamed about?
This song is crack. I love everything that’s going on here, the vocals, the lyrics, the spinning around fucked up in a field sensibility (that one might just be a me thing). Not to be all “I don’t know why everyone says you’re a bitch, I think you’re nice” but I genuinely don’t know why more people aren’t writing about this band - the whole recent EP Safe is really good.
This isn’t the single off the new Greet Death album Die In Love (I’m not like other girls etc). That is also very good, but it’s “Country Girl” that I kept returning to. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, but I’m not sure everyone needs to go alt-country now (though it seems they are still going to, with varying degrees of success) but Greet Death does a really good job of mixing that with shoegaze and whatever the fuck else they have going on, expertly invoking this desolate, sinister, dusty abandoned town vibe in their music, a long hot day that never ends (“We hit the liquor store and went to KFC”), ennui that gives way to breakdown and eventually breakthrough, the gash that lets the light in.
To be crystal clear, when I say not everyone should do alt-country, I don’t mean Wednesday, Wednesday should do whatever it is they are doing here, this clean, gorgeous, summery, sad, twangy perfection, a lot more. In fact I kind of want them to go one step further and go a little Donna Lewis “I Love You Always Forever” pop-country freaky with it because I think Karly Hartzman is one of the few artists who could actually pull that off. A girl can dream…
I really like this whole pummeling fucked panic attack of an album, even though I don’t personally have the fortitude to listen to it all in one sitting without losing my already tenuous grip on sanity. aya told The Quietus that she was heavily influenced by Silvia Federici’s 2004 book, Caliban and the Witch when making the album hexed! The book outlines “the radical idea that the medieval witch hunts that raged across Europe and colonial America, served to restructure the family and take ever more power from women, which was necessary for capitalism to grow: ‘The book was just whirring away in the background. But it possibly started me travelling along a road towards having a more magical or alchemical outlook on life, even though I was always very much a ‘rational skeptic’ about the idea of magic.’” Feminism has re-entered my body etc.
Lambrini Girls “Big Dick Energy”
Speaking of feminism and its timeshare in my body, I found myself loving this Lambrini Girls song (and a lot of the album it comes from) despite myself. Generally I don’t go in for “punk about patriarchy” because it doesn’t tend to be particularly interesting, effective, or good (tipping my hat to my internalized misogyny like hullo guvna), but there’s something about Lambini Girls’ super catchy, fast and loose, spit it out plain-spoken tenor that is really convincing and also (important!) really funny. Like, “Your woke persona is completely fucking terrifying” is really funny. “Kate Moss gives no fucks that my period has stopped” is really funny (and really dark, and really sadly evergreen). Naming your album Who Let The Dogs Out? Really fucking funny. I like to imagine this is like if Delta 5 had to grow up on Twitter. In fact maybe this is the second coming of “indie sleaze” we keep being threatened with, and if so, this kind is good.
In this house we love when George screams over Kerry’s beautiful guitars.
I feel like Angel Du$t is fully in their 90s NIN bag and I like it. Crying baby sample outro? Okay!
feeble little horse “This Is Real”
So many genres here! They really trick you with this ditty-do little start, we’re snapping, it’s catchy, the vocals are sort of computery and then boom, fuck you. Throws you all over the place for the duration, great mimicry of what it is to be sentient (and perhaps a touch too online) in 2025. Excellent screaming. A+
Sharp Pins “Every Time I Hear”
Kai Slater, I was not familiar with your game. I’m listening closely now!!!
I’ve been listening to the Purity Ring song “Fineshrine” a lot lately (man that song is fucking god tier) and wondering if witch house is ever coming back and I’m not saying this is that, but it might live next door at least.
Jason Isbell “Good While It Lasted”
This man is so good at writing break-up songs. (I hope he doesn’t have to write any more though).
I think this is probably too riffy and catchy and legible and na-na-na to be called shoegaze anymore but it’s still real good.
I don’t know what your guys’ problem is tbh.
Nilüfer Yanya is one of the best, most interesting voices to come out in the past few years. Beautiful and compelling. She is wonderful live as well; her set at Levitation in ATX last year was magnificent! Very lovely in person too!
Never enough is getting ridiculous hate just because they're "mainstream" now when the band is still making quality music despite their popularity.