Militarie Gun frontman Ian Shelton has never really sounded all that hinged, but on “God Save the Gun”, he practically revels in his own depravity. “Put me in the trash,” he sings proudly on “Throw Me Away,” the pummelling drums and wallop of a chorus seemingly there to beat the singer black and blue. It’s the most prevalent theme of the band’s second proper studio album, one that’s intent on looking inward with a ferocity both playful and almost unbearably intense.
Nowhere is this more evident than on “God Owes Me Money,” a song which might soundcheeky but is, with its depiction of childhood abuse, downright brutal in its bare-metal vulnerability. “I’ve been drunk every day for a month, I learned from you and mom,” Shelton sings later on the surprisingly restrained “Daydream,” unafraid to assign blame even among all the self-flagellation. Even so, “God Save the Gun” is a genuinely ecstatic record, a pure stank face of infectious hooks, call-and-response vocals, and wiry riffage. Even its dourest moments find an almost rapturous form of release. Like the open-handed shaman of its cover, Militarie Gun imagines a world where even the death cult of The Gun might put together a few fun group meals and a movie night or two.
The title of Planting by the Signs comes from southern Appalachian folkways, a custom of orienting life cycles by the moon that S.G. Goodman grew up with in Western Kentucky and rediscovered in the Foxfire books. The record is a rumination on that ritual reconnection to nature, and what to do when ritual itself seems futile. Marked by the deaths of her mentor Mike Harmon and her beloved pet dog, as well as the reconciliation with her former collaborator Matthew Rowan, Goodman navigates grief and renewal in her lyrics—and, like in nature, these seeds grow in wild and sometimes surprising shapes.
There’s a stroke of righteous fury on lead single “Snapping Turtle,” but a wistful serenity permeates the Bonnie “Prince”Billy duet “Nature’s Child,” written by Asheville songwriter Tyler Ladd.
Woven through it all is a sense of community: as a balm, as a shelter, and as a fortifying force. When Goodman cries “I have seen the light” on “Michael Told Me,” she’s not preaching—she’s witnessing the redemptive power of our connection to each other.
Rather than expanding or polishing up her sound, Lucy Dacus’ Blake Mills-produced fourth LP charts an ongoing evolution by refining the subtleties and zoning into the minutiae of her song writing, whose reflections of love, fame, and trust now concern some of the very people helping to bring it to life. Save for ‘Limerence’, the album’s advance singles have mostly been bouncy and mid-tempo, but there’s an enticing tug-of-war between those songs and the deep cuts that pull back. “Forever” is about travelling long distances and trying to transcend them, about tasting forever in the throes of change, taking the gamble on love when you’re caught between fantasy and truth. It doesn’t always sound as big as the concepts Dacus invokes – God, Fate, Chance – but it’s in the stillest moments that you know exactly what she means, leaving you in a chokehold.
The indie-rock troubadour’s fourth album, “Forever Is a Feeling”, trades coming-of-age storytelling for adult-specific love songs, “I’m thinking about breaking your heart someday soon,” Lucy Dacus confesses in “Limerance,” one of the highlights from her fourth album “Forever Is a Feeling”. It’s a twisted supper-club piano ballad where she’s munching popcorn with friends who smoke weed and play Grand Theft Auto. But the Virginia indie-rock troubadour croons as if she’s living out a lush-life fantasy of Hollywood romance. When she delivers that line about breaking someone’s heart, she gives it a twist: “And if I do, I’ll be breaking mine too.” It’s startling to hear Dacus switch gears like that, in her warmly familiar voice — earnest, mournful, calm even when she’s tormented.
Dacus stretches out on “Forever Is a Feeling“, at a moment when she’s at her most high-profile. It’s her first album since she conquered the world with Boygenius, teaming up with two of the only indie peers anywhere near her level, Julian Baker and Phoebe Bridgers. “The Record” had three radically different singer-songwriters blending their voices to come up with new kinds of magic. Dacus’ “You’re in Love” was a brilliant heart-crippler on par with “Triple Dog Dare,” from her masterful 2021 musical memoir “Home Video”.
“Forever” takes a different approach, going for adult-specific love songs, rather than the coming-of-age and coming-out tales that made her name. These songs take place in the middle of long-running messy relationships — some desperately romantic, some just painful. “Best Guess” might be the most hopeful song she’s done yet, singing, “You’re my best guess at the future/If I were a gambling man, and I am/You’d be my best bet.” She gets vocal help from comrades like Bartees Strange and Jay Som’s Melina Duterte, telling her inamorata, “You may not be angel, but you are my girl.”(Bridgers and Baker pitch in with back-up vocals elsewhere.)
When Dacus first arrived, she was a Southern indie kid with a shy voice, yet her own steely onstage charisma. It was a revelation to see her get up in a bar and sing her solo acoustic version of Bruce Springsteen’s“Dancing in the Dark,” turning it into the tale of an anxious queer teen in the sticks, hating what she sees in the mirror but gearing up her courage to go face the great big world. Her sophomore gem “Historian“, in 2018, stopped you dead in your tracks with “Night Shift,” turning a stupid coffee get-together with an ex into a seven-minute soliloquy of revenge and guilt.
On “Forever Is a Feeling“, she aims for more intimate drama. “If the devil’s in the details, then God is in the gap in your teeth,” she sings in “For Keeps.” In the jubilant title song, she takes a romantically charged road-trip over sped-up piano, recalling, “We were cherry-red in your forest-green 1993 Grand Cherokee.” It’s also a song about the emotional compromises that go with desire, as she sings, “You knew the scenic route/I knew the shortcut and shut my mouth/Isn’t that what love’s about?” But there’s a new sense of giddy release in her voice, especially when she asks, “My wrists are in your zip-tie, 25 to life—why not?”
“Bullseye” is a duet with Hozier, where she pines for a guitar-playing mailman. “I miss borrowing your books to read your names in the margins,” Hozier purrs to her harmonies. “The closest I got to reading your mind.” “Last Time” and “Big Deal” are more downbeat acoustic ballads. “Most Wanted” is the album’s only guitar rocker, and easily its most urgent track sonically, a Byrds-style rave where she’s on a mission “to catch the Most Wanted Man in West Tennessee.” It’s full of electric sexual tension, with her most breathless vocals, as she sings, “I feel your hand under the table at the fancy restaurant/Gripping on my inner thigh like if you don’t I’m gonna run/But I’m not going anywhere.”
Dacus does a lot of self-conscious playing with clichés on “Forever”, a trick that sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t, as in the dud “Come Out,” which uses over-the-top harp glissandi as a camp punchline.
But it works beautifully in “Ankles,” where she sings about libidinal frustration over staccato cellos, asking, “What if we don’t touch?/What if we only talk about what we want/And cannot have/And I’ll throw a fit?” The tension builds until it explodes in the chorus (“Pull me by the ankles to the edge of the bed”), with surprisingly poignant Eighties synth burbles. Near the end of the song, she muses, “How lucky we are to have so much to lose.” It could be a motto for Dacus looking back on her amazing first decade—and looking at the unlimited future ahead.
It’s a shame when everyone seems to talk around (not even about) one of the year’s best releases—and it certainly doesn’t help when the artist also shares what she’s deemed a “real” album in the same year, pulling the focus of more fair weathered fans away. Regardless of whether you first checked out Ethel Cain’s January “release” “Perverts” just to hear a supposed middle finger to a more mainstream fanbase and a label situation the artist wanted over and done with, it doesn’t take away from the fact that it remains Hayden Anhedönia’s most staggering full-length work to date.
Mining inspiration from the drone and ambient north stars she’s proudly cited as favourites since 2021’s “Preacher’s Daughter” first pulled her fully into the spotlight (if you’re a Grouper fan, this is likely high on your personal ranking for the year), “Perverts” is an atmospheric exercise, digging to the filthiest, most cryptic core of her sonic obsessions. The grinding whir of “Houseofpsychoticwomn” and bleating strings of “Pulldone” might have driven all the heated conversation for those less interested in Anhedönia’s more avant-garde tendencies, but there are moments of pure salvation (the climax of “Onanist” or the sparse beauty of closer “Amber Waves”) that could convert any skeptic, if they have the patience. Let them talk all they want. I’ll spend my time kneeling at “Perverts’ altar again and again.
Though its nine tracks are almost 90 minutes long, “Perverts” isn’t an actual album, according to its creator. Rather, this drone-inspired record that scared, confused, and put off a lot of Ethel Cain’s fans upon its release in January is an experimental sideshow that has nothing to do with her 2022 debut, “Preacher’s Daughter“, nor the two succeeding records that will complete that narrative trilogy. Except, of course, for the fact that Cain is behind it.
The project is a starkly haunting, harrowing, and challenging piece of music that transports the listener into a wholly unrecognizable world from that of “Preacher’s Daughter” as well as from the proper album “Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You“, which was released later in the year.
Especially early on during the eerie, old-timey introduction of the opening title track and the periods of near-but-not-quite silence that follow over the song’s 12 minute run-time, it feels like you’re in the pitch black of a horror film or video game, such is the visceral sense of dread and unease that underlines this record. Yet there are (very necessary) moments of sublime and poignant beauty, too. It all makes for a demanding but immensely rewarding listen that marks Cain out as a truly incredible, iconoclastic talent.
Long time friends and collaborators Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten are back with a new album as Momma, which sounds straight out of the mid ’90s but takes place in the summer of 2022, when Momma were on their first-ever tour. More than just chronicling the breakups and new romances of that time period, their best songs shimmer with summer’s potential and immediacy, pairing easy harmonies with the punch of slacker rock. They also expand their sound into other cornerstones of that era, delivering shoegazey riffs on “Last Kiss” and hushed acoustic tenderness on “Take Me With You.”
“Welcome to My Blue Sky” is an album that’s easy to like, and even easier to imagine blasting on a road trip with your best friend sitting shotgun. The second full-length from Momma bottled up hot July days defined by cicada buzz, cheap booze, and go-nowhere rubber-burning. It sounded like a coming-of-age movie and a gonzo-style road trip while also transcending the I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-the-’90s pitfall once and for all.
Built around the song writing core of Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten, Momma came in hot with 2022’s breakout “Household Name“. And while their love of joyrides (so many lyrics about cars) and ’90s bubble grunge never waned, they did soften their focus on “Welcome to My Blue Sky”, creating a more insular album that resonated because of the dialogue between its two personalities. Friedman and Weingarten were likely the outcast kids scrawling lyrics in their notebooks at the back of their respective classrooms, finding each other wordlessly in the hallway between periods. And when they aren’t answering each other with words—inside jokes and knowingly kitschy sweet-nothings—their guitars finish each other’s sentences.
These riffs can flutter and waver like butterflies or slam you across the room á la Marty McFly with that jet-engine-sized amp. “Blue Sky” is always purposeful but never feels laboured-over, glossy but not airbrushed. It’s sometimes the stuff of movie scripts but also founded on shared experiences and connections that are totally real. I guess occasionally life is just that cinematic.
The riveting debut album from the young firestarters from Austin is the year’s most explosive new soundtrack for your local moshpit. The all-female quartet, all still in their early twenties, has mastered multiple hard-rock genres with attitude and skill—punk, grunge, metal, doom—and sounds both blissfully unhinged and utterly in command.
How good is the band Die Spitz? Well, the quartet was awarded Album of the Year by the Austin Music Awards last year… for an EP! The band, Ava Livingston, Chloe Andrews, Ellie Livingston, and Kate Halter, are one of, if not the best young live act in Texas right now, and their debut album, “Something to Consume”, all but confirms their place in the punk pantheon right now.
Released by Jack White’s Third Man label, “Something to Consume” opens with the crunch and growl of “Pop Punk Anthem (Sorry for the Delay)” as singer-guitarist Ava Schrobilgen roars in frustration and rage amid the crashing guitars: “All this tension / Everybody here can see / And did I mention / I need you to take care of me?” On “Throw Yourself to the Sword,” Schrobilgen’s childhood friend Eleanor Livingston rides a galloping metal riff, growling and grunting a warning: “Take what’s mine, then I take two times more.” Believe her. Meanwhile, “American Porn” is fully flowered ’90s grunge, with riffs thick enough for the Melvins. The group’s 34-minute debut statement.
There’s a great balance in the tracklist, as “Go Get Dressed”’ steady, gentle build turns into a thrashing, throbbing breakthrough on “Red40.” Every song pummels, but not every song blisters. Working with Will Yip, it’s clear that he was the best man for the job. “Something to Consume” tackles everything from hardcore to metal to grunge. “Riding With My Girls” is fantastic, and “American Porn” is a bad-bitch tome. “Punishers” carries Twilight inspirations, and the powerful “Voire Dire” sounds like a sign of our fucked-up times. There’s a trust percolating throughout the record, one brought on by four people who couldn’t imagine making music with anyone else. This is music that yells in all-caps.
The album captures the melody and chaos without unwarranted studio gloss. By the time “Something to Consume” reaches its brooding finale, this restless gang of rockers are still just getting started and have already raised the bar.
“The Clearing” the brand new album from Wolf Alice, releases 29th August 2025. Written in Seven Sisters and recorded in LA with Grammy-winning, master producer Greg Kurstin last year, “The Clearing” reveals where Wolf Alice stand sonically in 2025, delivering a supremely confident collection of songs bursting with ambition, ideas and emotion.
With their perfectly ripened fourth album, Wolf Alice returned more assured than ever. Potent reflections on love, friendship and aging came hand-wrought with brassy riffs, craggy drumbeats and well-worn piano keys, as the four-piece found contentment in the space where everything and nothing is certain.
Wolf Alice unveil ‘The Clearing’, a commanding and emotionally rich album that captures the band’s evolving sound in 2025. the record channels confidence and creative ambition across a dynamic set of tracks. It’s a snapshot of a band fully in their stride—fearless, expressive, and constantly pushing forward.
Wolf Alice have previewed their forthcoming fourth album with a new track called ‘White Horses’. Following ‘Bloom Baby Bloom’ and ‘The Sofa’, it’s the only song on “The Clearing” to feature drummer Joel Amey on lead vocals, and it grows into a cathartic duet with Ellie Rowsell.
“I was inspired by what songs we had already that were becoming“The Clearing”; the sonic shapes we were creating, the big acoustics, the harmonies, but I wanted to underpin it with a driving krautrock beat,” Amey explained in a statement. The track was born out of some lyrics he jotted down during a car journey with his mum, aunt, and sister. “We’ve never really known where we came in terms of heritage until recently. My mum and my aunt were adopted, and for years it posed questions of identity and where our roots lay for all of us, but for me, they never seemed like answers I needed to find out.”
Amey added: “I was on this big adventure with my best mates, never feeling the need to call one place home, living out a suitcase, all the stuff that comes with being in a band. I felt that the answers to ‘who I am and where do I come from?’ didn’t matter so much; I’d chosen my family and they were the people around me.”
”White Horses” was me trying to put all that into a tune, and Ellie, Joff and Theo helped me all along the way,” he concluded.
Two of folky indie rock’s finest singer/songwriters come together for an entry into the queer country canon.
Before everyone started going country, before Chappell Roan had a hit with a lesbian country song, and even before boygenius formed, the seeds were sown for Julien Baker and Torres’ queer country album “Send a Prayer My Way“. After they played their first show together back in 2016, one said to the other, “We should make a country album.”
So you certainly can’t call them bandwagon jumpers and it should also come as no surprise that making full-blown country music comes as naturally to this pair as it does. Julien grew up in Memphis and Torres moved to Nashville after graduating high school, and their music always had a little twang that really comes to the forefront on “Send a Prayer My Way“. They’ve got pedal steel, fiddle, and honky tonk rhythms, and their country roots are also apparent in the album’s subject matter, which explores Julien and Torres’ shared Southern Baptist heritage as queer people and the skeletons buried there.
Both artists are known for vulnerable lyricism, and they bring that to this collaboration, delving into addiction and shame while also seasoning it with dark humor–like “Tuesday”‘s segue from a dark night of the soul to “if you ever hear this song, tell your mama she can go suck an egg,” or the skit about the viscousness of jelly before “Goodbye Baby.” And even if you’re a Julien Baker or Torres fan that hasn’t fully jumped on the country train, there’s plenty to like about “Send a Prayer My Way”. It often balances out its twang with the kind of folky indie rock that Julien and Torres both separately won us over with in the previous decade. It’s easy to see why they wanted to work together after sharing the stage for the very first time; they’re kindred spirits.
The sweet vocal harmonizing of Melbourne-based Folk Bitch Trio brings to mind figures like The Beach Boys, Fleet Foxes, First Aid Kit, or Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young—the perfect harmonic soundtrack for sitting near a campfire amid lush, majestic redwoods. An impressive debut, “Now Would Be a Good Time” is warm and perfectly uniform acoustic-folk music that lulls the listener into its cozy cocoon. Underneath the snug progressions, though, we get an exploration of early-twenties adulthood, growing pains, and failed relationships. Grace Sinclair, Jeanie Pilkington, and Heide Peverelle’s emotional explorations of young adulthood are evocative and sometimes darkly funny (particularly on “Hotel TV,” where they’re trying not to think about what’s going on in the room next door). Producer Tom Healy captures the essence of the three childhood friends’ music, creating a bittersweet, reflective atmosphere that complements their lyrics. Even with its minor flourishes of electric guitar, the folky spirit of “NowWould Be a Good Time” remains intact.
Recorded in New Zealand at Roundhead Studios, the more laid-back atmosphere of Auckland can be felt in harmony with their music nearly to the point that they could bill themselves as a quartet.
When Florida-born Orleans parish singer Benjamin Booker gets the blues, he likes to funnel its lightning-loud, Albert King–stylized classicism with a hint of the crackling garage-rock ardor of The White Stripes—that’s been a given since his 2014 self-titled debut. With “Lower”, however, Booker goes lower still to an icier sonic space, and with the help of shuddering electro-rap producer Kenny Segal he finds the fight in his cause and righteous indignation everywhere.
“Black Opps” looks at empowered African Americans of the past (and surely present) being brought down by the US government. The children at the center of “Same Kind of Lonely” are given dark context within a collage of school shooting audio clips.
Those less fortunates brought to heel by addiction and homelessness are given light and hope, even if they have to claw their way through the darkness to get there. “I see the way they talk about people on this side of town,” a bruised Booker intones on “LWA in the Trailer Park,” a moment not unlike King’s “Born Under a Bad Sign.” Maybe “Lower” is a lot to take in all at once, and maybe Booker’s third album isn’t an obvious choice for one of the best of 2025, as it seems from another time—long before January.
Either way, “Lower” lingers like a haunting refrain and the darkest of nu-politics screeds.
The Fat Angel Sings 