Flea has announced a new solo album that will be released next year on Nonesuch Records. As yet untitled, it finds the Red Hot Chili Pepper bassist returning to his first instrument, the trumpet, and it’s being previewed today by ‘A Plea’, which almost sounds like it could have made Geordie Greep’s own solo debut. Check it out via the music video, directed by Flea’s daughter Clara Balzary and featuring choreography by Sadie Wilking, below.
‘A Plea’ urges listeners “build a bridge, shine a light, make something beautiful and see somebody, give it to somebody,” according to Flea. It features him on electric bass, vocals, and trumpet, backed by double bassist Anna Butterss, guitarist Jeff Parker, drummer Deantoni Parks, percussionist Mauro Refosco, alto flutist Rickey Washington, and trombonist Vikram Devasthali. Chris Warren contributes vocals, as does the song’s producer, Josh Johnson, who also plays alto saxophone.
Flea described the song’s lyrics as “yearning for a place beyond, a place of love, for me to speak my mind and be myself. I’m always just trying to be myself.” He added, “I don’t care about the act of politics. I think there is a much more transcendent place above it where there’s discourse to be had that can actually help humanity, and actually help us all to live harmoniously and productively in a way that’s healthy for the world. There’s a place where we meet, and it’s love.”
Critics listen to a lot of new music every day, which means they get to spend every December – or November, since that’s when several year-end lists have started popping up – harping on about how some of their favorite albums couldn’t make the cut. For the first time in my five years as music editor of this publication, we’re expanding the annual best albums list to highlight 100 rather than 50 albums – and there are still many records I’ll be coming back to that just aren’t included. The always slightly arbitrary nature of ranking means that albums that are relatively low on this list, including by previous AOTY holders, might have been higher during a less eventful year. What’s certain is that no two albums here are quite alike, and you’ll find at least one thing that might have slipped under your radar. Here are the 100 best albums of 2025.
100. Star 99, Gaman
On their sophomore LP, Gaman, Star 99 are still making punchy, exhilarating songs while pushing beyond – though not necessarily past – the twee sensibilities of their 2023 debut Bitch Unlimited, making way not just for the confrontational nature but the poetic nuances of their songwriting. As Saoirse Alesandro and Thomas Romero trade vocals, revealing the core emotions that bind their songs – insecurity, resentment, isolation, often fueled by the fire of generational trauma – you get less of a sense that these are separate people bringing songs to the table than just two friends, in a band, facing similar strifes – and getting through them. Which is, definitionally, the art of gaman. Check out our Artist Spotlight interview with Star 99.
Featuring nearly the same backing band as last year’s Kabutomushi EP, Mei Semones‘ full-length debut deepens her seamless blend of dreamy bossa nova and jazz-inflected indie rock, maintaining a gorgeous atmosphere while dynamically maneuvering from one odd feeling to another. There’s so much heart and charm in it, though, that no part of its eclectism feels alienating. “There’s something I like about it,” she sings of the ‘Dumb Feeling’ that opens the album, then spends the rest of it elaborating in a musical language entirely her own. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Mei Semones.
Different Talking is the first album Frankie Cosmos recorded as a unit with no outside studio producers, tracking it at a house in upstate New York that they all lived in for a month and a half. Which, in a funny little way, means that it is the first self-produced Frankie Cosmos since Greta Kline first started posting sparse folk-pop songs on Bandcamp. More than reevaluating the meaning of home-recording at a different point in life, of course, Different Talking considers and embodies home, grief, and all those microcosmic, universe-expanding feelings the heart seems to produce in circles as the world flashes by. “We can all agree/ That time is both frozen and moving faster than we can see,” goes a song titled ‘One! Grey! Hair!’. We can all agree, and Frankie Cosmos can play to its rhythm. Read our inspirations interview with Frankie Cosmos.
There might be a self-reflective throughline across Danny Brown‘s latest effort – and first since becoming sober – but it doesn’t hinge on the introspective, natural flows of his last album, Quaranta. Instead, it feeds off the communal energy of a crew of cutting-edge, hyperpop-adjacent artists who help the 44-year-old affirm not just his status and lyrical dexterity, but the reason he keeps falling back in love with music. “You wondered what made things enjoyable when you were younger,” Angel Prost, one half of Frost Children, intones at one point. More than just wondering, Stardust – easeful and electrifying, relaxed and glitched-out – simply revels. Read the full review.
While Sword II‘s debut album, Spirit World Tour, focused on abrasive experimentation, the Atlanta trio’s follow-up finds them honing in on their collaborative songwriting: still eclectic and radical in spirit, only this time channelled through lush arrangements, greater lyrical clarity – not to mention longing – and warmly inviting harmonies. As blissfully disorienting as it is renewed with purpose, the new album was recorded in a basement of an old home they rented where the wiring was so faulty they had to use acoustic instruments to avoid electric shocks. “You’re so puzzled/ Trying to believe in something/ On your own,” they sing on ‘Halogen’. But together? That’s a whole different world of possibilities. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Sword II.
For their mesmerizing second album, Magic of the Sale, Teethe‘s recording process, split between their current home bases across Dallas and Austin, stayed virtually unchanged: tracking demos and uploading them to a shared folder. This time, though, the group of trusted contributors that helped bring to life their tender-hearted melancholy and warm existentialism widened: Charlie Martin of Hovvdy, performing additional piano; Wednesday/MJ Lenderman’s Xandy Chelmis on pedal steel, producer Logan Hornyak of Melaina Kol, and Emily Elkin on cello. “Hear your words like photos felt in sound,” a muffled voice sings on ‘Iron Wine’, stirring a wave of distortion. “Holding what our eyes can’t make up now.” Magic of the Sale sounds like slowing down the blink of an eye, where the smallest, most precious emotions seep into view. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Teethe.
When it comes to love, Hatchie knows that even the fleeting stage of infatuation encompasses more than just ecstasy. “Something lingers in the sea between/ Much more than this midwinter kiss,” she sings on ‘Sage’, a highlight on her new album Liquorice, which triangulates the dizziness, desperation, and disillusionment of young romance like it’s something you can bite into, savouring every layer. Recorded at Jay Som’s home studio in Los Angeles, Liquorice brims with nostalgic influences, but Pilbeam’s maturing perspective – she’s 32 and married to her longtime collaborator Joe Agius – makes it feel worlds away from the project’s beginnings almost a decade ago. “I’m still stuck with these pathetic dreams,” she sings on the closer, a sentiment that could suck the life out of anyone. For Hatchie, it’s all colour. Read our inspirations interview with Hatchie.
Parader is torn between Keaton Henson‘s present reality of living in the English countryside and the fragmented memories that reverberate through it; fittingly, production duties were split Luke Sital-Singh, who grew up with similar emo and hardcore influences as Henson, and Alex Farrar – in his words, “the king of that loud, snarky American DIY sound” – who helped him tap into a grungy, guttural, arguably American confidence that used to be as formative as it was aspirational, even mythical. “Do I really have any business now/ Singing this song and sounding like I did when I was eighteen?” he sings on ‘Past It’. Singing to him, maybe, the part he knows would be stoked about being part of the whole parade. Read our inspirations interview with Keaton Henson.
From their first rehearsal together, it took less than a year for bloodsports to record their blistering debut LP, Anything Can Be a Hammer. Produced by Hayden Ticehurst, the album innervates the band’s slowcore foundations, its volatile songs often beginning with spare, somber guitar parts before bursting with noise, though never exactly in the direction you expect them to. Murphy’s lyrics teeter between sweet stream-of-consciousness and nightmarish dejection, blurring the line between fragility and confidence. “It forces an odd reaction/ Coarse and affirmed/ Cuts like a razor,” he sings almost self-consciously on the closing title track, which might leave you feeling the same way: no less alone, but strangely moved by the ever-evolving chaos. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with bloodsports.
“I got caught in the teeth of the thoughts that keep me awake,” Stefan Babcock sings on ‘Paranoid’, a blistering highlight off PUP‘s Who Will Look After the Dogs?. Gnawing at intrusive thoughts is baked into the Canadian punk outfit’s DNA, but the despair that pervades the follow-up to 2022’s The Unraveling of PUPTheBand is so visceral that it threatens to throw the band’s signature mix of darkness and snark way off balance. Babcock wrote more, and more alone, than he has for any other PUP record, and while learning to be aware of his headspace was a crucial part of the process, inspiration also struck by practicing the things that grounded and distracted him. Read our inspirations interview with PUP.
Named after a song by ‘90s post-hardcore outfit Radio Flyer, Rocket‘s debut album was recorded between 64 Sound and the Foo Fighters’ Studio 606, but rather than calling in a big-ticket indie producer, guitarist Desi Scaglione helmed the process himself. All but one of the record’s early singles were tracked at Studio 606, pushing forth its most thunderous and anthemic qualities; but what makes R Is for Rocket such a refreshing, fully-realized debut is its emotional range and earnest experimentation. “I wanna be the one to make it out of your dreams,” Alithea Tuttle repeats on ‘Another Second Chance’, as they all sound like they’re living their own. Read our Artist Spotlight interview.
Jenn Wasner’s radiant new album under the Flock of Dimes moniker creates a warmly inviting, deceptively straightforward environment to accommodate its complex ideas around addiction and co-dependency. Two decades into her career – with several solo records under her belt aside from her work in Wye Oak and collaborations with Bon Iver, Sylvan Esso, and many others – the simplicity of its songs can feel subversive, and, more importantly, the only way to really sit with and wrench the truth out of them, paradoxical as it may seem. As she reminds herself on ‘Defeat’, “I’m inside it, after all.” Read our inspirations interview with Flock of Dimes.
After releasing their sun-kissed, soulful debut Evil Joy in 2021, Fust – now a seven-piece featuring songwriter Aaron Dowdy, drummer Avery Sullivan, pianist Frank Meadows, guitarist John Wallace, multi-instrumentalist Justin Morris, fiddlist Libby Rodenbough, and bassist Oliver Child-Lanning – decamped to Drop of Sun to record Genevieve with producer Alex Farrar, with whom they reunited for their astounding new album, Big Ugly. Named after an unincorporated area in southern West Virginia, around which Dowdy’s family has deep roots, the record is conflicted yet aspirational: homey while grappling with the mystery of home, hopeful when hope rests between the promise of a new life and relenting in old, slow, ragged ways. As the title may suggest, it wrings beauty out of the most unexpected places, honing in the band’s knack for making small feelings appear monumental – that is, closer to their true experience. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Fust.
“I’m undressed, paperless, filter gone,” Stella Donnelly sings on ‘Year of Trouble’ as she begins to confront the loneliness of a friendship falling apart. She does dress up other songs, like its brattier counterpart in ‘Feel It Change’, but that nakedness is what helps the record move from one chapter to the next, like taking heartbreak by its daily swings. Searing and unguarded, Love and Fortune is not just a record about bridges burned and straining for reconciliation, but a reclamation of the dozen selves pecking for attention in the midst of solitude. “Take back my little life, and push you away/ I set myself on fire, for someone else’s flame,” she sings on ‘W.A.L.K.’. More than careful not to reignite it, by the end of the ride, Donnelly sounds caring, kind, and turns out, more than a little fortunate. Read our inspirations interview with Stella Donnelly.
Kali Uchis’ records tend to feel like a breeze, even when the Colombian American singer-songwriter drifts between styles and languages. But Sincerely, seals itself into her very own paradise. Though it elicits many of the same pleasures as 2024’s Orquídeas, it feels like a world apart: the album boasts no guest features, with the majority of the songs growing out of voice notes and sung entirely in English. Its dreamy, timeless euphoria may scan as one-dimensional, but there’s delight in hearing Uchis luxuriate in the transformations of her life, still admitting insecurities while letting the good parts bleed together. Her music often feels sun-kissed; here, she soaks it all up. Read the full review.
“I’m so sorry,” Kassie Carlson proclaims on the opening track of Guerilla Toss‘ new album, emphatic enough to instantly register as irony, “I came to party.” She gets lost as her head throbs on the way to another party on ‘Red Flag to Angry Bull’, where her friend is “Telling me he’s gonna eat the sunshine/ Though he isn’t walking in a straight line.” The burst of positivity is hallucinatory, intoxicating, and downright maddening, yet it also makes complete sense considering how and where the experimental rock band made You’re Weird Now. The album keeps twitching and triumphing in its communal cacophony, precise-engineered to convince you that even if today feels a lot more like a hellhole than a party, you are certainly not alone in it. Read our inspirations interview with Guerilla Toss.
Austra‘s majestic fifth album traces her journey of grieving the end of a relationship by translating its chaotic emotions through the lens of Greek tragedy, the euphoria of Eurodance, and science fiction that overwhelms with its humanity. These filters do nothing to restrain the purity of Katie Stelmanis’ performances, embodied equally in their humour, brokenness, and hope. “I don’t wanna cry about you forever,” she sings on ‘Look Me in the Eye’, not hiding the time it’s taken to get there; savouring the yawn instead of rushing into a new day. Read our inspirations interview with Austra.
Written after she relocated from Los Angeles to New York, Eliza McLamb‘s sophomore LP as wry and introspective as her Sarah Tudzin-produced debut while leaning into feelings of absurdity and chaos; not just taking stock of the changes in her early 20s, but unpacking the self-narrativizing patterns behind them. “Writing it down and making it real/ Skipping the step where I remember to feel,” she sings on the title track, reconciling by holding the stories lightly and reminding herself the present is all she has: boring and difficult, sacred and eternal. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Eliza McLamb.
Sometimes, even beautiful words aren’t right for a piece of music that can transport you on its own, a skill Meg Duffy cultivates by going long periods of time making only instrumental music and playing in other people’s bands – previously Kevin Morby, now Perfume Genius. While Hand Habits‘ Blue Reminder is wonderfully arranged and subtly cinematic, the lyrics feel all the more carefully intimate, the phrasing more precise, the singing more confident – if only to serve the unspoken feeling of the song. “We don’t need to Talk Talk,” they sing early on, sneaking in a double entendre, “too much.” Which is enough to say they’re hungry for more. Read our inspirations interview with Hand Habits.
After finishing his tour in support of 2023’s Heaven Is a Junkyard, Trevor Powers stumbled upon a shoebox of home videos from his childhood in his parents’ basement. It’s no surprise, given his textured, self-reflective approach to songwriting, that audio samples from the tapes would end up on his next album as Youth Lagoon, Rarely Do I Dream. Powers’ most powerful tool, however, isn’t nostalgia but juxtaposition, which he employs to harden the line between the innocence of childhood and the violent currents of today, between juvenile dreams and intoxicated fantasies, obliviousness and imagination; and to diffuse it, too. It’s relentless and revitalizing – proof that whatever Powers does next might look to the past, but will hardly look like the thing that came before. Read the full review.
The Weather Station’s work has earned praised for its seamless elegance and fluidity, especially since Tamara Lindeman expanded the project’s folksy origins on 2021’s breakout Ignorance. But never has the Toronto-based singer-songwriter paid attention to the seams – the parts of life and art that, as she acknowledges on the closer ‘Sewing’, most people are willing to ignore – as she does on her visceral new album, Humanhood. Affording space to both the sophistipop grandeur of Ignorance and the free-flowing intimacy of its companion LP, 2022’s How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars, Lindeman and her remarkable band trace the process of dissociation, laying out the broken pieces and the possibility of reintegrating them, the shakiness of truth and all the purpose it provides. Humanhood keeps moving like that, imperfect but enlightened, the music an “undulating thing,” as Lindeman puts it, “this blanket I seem to be making from pride and shame, beauty and guilt.” Read the full review.
Produced by No Age’s Randy Randall, the debut album from the Chicago trio is buoyant, destabilizing, and incandescent, splicing together bursts of power-pop, dance-punk, dub, and concentrated noise with the playful, organic immediacy of a group constantly tuning into each other as much as their influences. Lifeguard’s music may occasionally sound unsettled or claustrophobic, but it’s never totally, well, guarded; as a collective and part of a broader DIY community, their goal is to keep opening it up. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Lifeguard.
The music MIKE makes instantly feels like an intimate dialogue, and Showbiz! is no exception. Between his richly lackadaisical delivery and hypnagogic use of samples, the looseness and fluidity of the New York rapper-producer’s approach keep the listener engaged but never more than arm’s length away. Yet what remains beyond grasp for MIKE, always at an odd distance, is the perfect sense of home, something he keeps searching for across the LP – though “home” is where he recorded all of it, in phases after stretches of touring. Similarly, he muses on the idea of breakout success more than simply lounging on it. “The prize isn’t much, but the price is abundant,” he raps on ‘Artist of the Century’, an apt summation of the whole project.
Emily Sprague has no trouble baring her soul out in her lyrics. Intimacy, like tenderness, has and never will be a difficult thing for the Florist enterprise, or “friendship project,” as they call it, which includes Rick Spataro, Jonnie Baker, and Felix Walworth. The challenge, bigger than ever on their first album since their resplendent 2022 self-titled effort, is sounding at peace with a world hurtling towards catastrophe; staying soft, friendly, and curious when grief continues to bear its mark on you. But the music can also only be as delicate as the line between the threads of consciousness Sprague bounces between – waking, altered, existential – thin enough to let light slip through yet expansive enough to get lost in. For all its quiet optimism and awe, Jellywish is never quite restful or easygoing; much in the same way that, for all its introspection, it never truly stands alone. Read the full review.
On their first album in 23 years, Pulp are still caught up with the inexplicable nature of beauty and love. But for perhaps the first time in the group’s history, Jarvis Cocker seems less fazed by those things, homing in on the feeling and spelling out the ineffable, sometimes literally, as on the early single ‘Got to Have Love’. More is the product of waiting, not taking, a long time to make something – of your fears, of missed opportunities, of time itself. “The universe shrugged, then moved on.” And then it hits you. In the wake of longtime Pulp member Steve Mackey’s death in 2023, as well as the passing of Cocker’s mother early last year, the follow-up to 2001’s Scott Walker-produced We Love Life feels effortful yet elegant in its insistence on expressing love, not just the kind that endures, but the ones that disintegrate or never even really existed. Read the full review.
Greet Death co-vocalists Logan Gaval and Harper Boyhtari have been friends since elementary school, spending much of their preteen and adolescent years in the same basement in Davisburg, Michigan where they recorded their first album in six years, Die in Love. But while the record was written during a period of profound change and loss, and starts riotously with the title track, much of it sounds relaxed in its melancholy, not quite resigned but strangely comforted by the inevitable embrace – the idea that, “At the end of the day, we’re lucky to lose people we care about,” as Boyhtari said in press materials, a sentiment echoed in Boyhtari’s chorus of, “Emptiness is everywhere, so hold each other close.” Read our inspirations interview with Greet Death.
It’s one thing to write music from the stomach versus the heart, as was Will Wiesenfeld’s intention for Gut, his first Baths album in seven years. It’s not a guarantee the songs will actually hit like that. In Gut’s case, though, there’s really barely any separation between the philosophical and the guttural, the feeling and its translation, eschewing the fear of being lost in both. Since releasing his first album under the moniker, Cerulian, in 2010, Wiesenfeld’s work has always been characterized by an unshakeable and downright mimetic physicality, boundless in its erosion of boundaries between real and fantastical worlds. But the self-released Gut – which features live drums on more than half its tracks – is newly unfiltered and unruly in a way that carves a path forward for the project. Read our inspirations interview with Baths.
45 Pounds is as trashy as it is taut, as harsh as it is relentlessly hooky. It’s a combination that brings to mind contemporary purveyors of controlled chaos such as Gilla Band and Model/Actriz, though what’s remarkable about the New York-based experimental outfit’s corrosive, improvisational blend of punk, hardcore, and electronic music is how fully realized – and funky – it sounds on their debut full-length. Zack Borzone’s vocal chops manage to stand out amidst the discombobulating interplay between Jack Tobias’ radiant synths and Sam Pickard’s frenzied percussion, which peaks on the penultimate track ‘Blackout’. It sprints forward while keeping you on your toes.
72. Japanese Breakfast, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)
Don’t let the title – itself a nod to a John Cheever short story – fool you: the deeper you listen to For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), the harder it is to pigeonhole it. It’s less for any kind of female archetype than it is about a certain brand of foolish masculinity it frames as both timeless and contemporary. It’s about Michelle Zauner, too, a singer-songwriter and author who, following the pop-inflected glee and success of Jubilee, her 2021 breakthrough as Japanese Breakfast – not to mention her similarly lauded memoir, Crying in H Mart – felt the need to shuffle through a cast of fictional characters variously removed and reflective of her own pensiveness. Her nuanced, moody vignettes are matched by richly baroque and luscious production courtesy of Blake Mills, who lends mountainous resonance even to the subtlest songs. Read the full album review.
While he continues to build an impressive resume as an engineer, Asheville musician Colin Miller found time to make and release Losin’, the heart-wrenching follow-up to 2023’s Haw Creek. Featuring MJ Lenderman on drums and guitar, as well as his Wednesday/The Wind bandmates Ethan Baechtold (bass, keys, aux percussion) and Xandy Chelmis (pedal steel), the album was recorded at Drop of Sun with producer Alex Farrar. There are a couple of layers to its title: the record untangles a period of intense grief following the death of Gary King, who owned the Haw Creek property and served as a father figure to Miller; it’s also a literal reference to trying to win the lottery in hopes of buying the home, which he rented for 13 years. Even when the pain swells, echoing in every note his friends play, Miller keeps up the effort – if not for the unattainable, then simply to keep the engine running. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Colin Miller.
There was one thing Westerman and producer Marta Salogni could not escape during their five-week residency in the Greek island of Hydra: the searing heat, which forced them to work through the night. There’s a dazed, liminal spontaneity to the record that offsets its conversational tendencies, much like its unadorned moments are balanced out by the sweltering light of ‘Adriatic’ or ‘Weak Hands’. In the dark, sleepless hours between recording and not, you can imagine the artist gazing up at the sky: “Home found/ Then forgotten/The gamble,” he sings on ‘About Leaving’, “Awake, and looking starward.” Read our inspirations interview with Westerman.
DÍA is no less self-reflective than Ela Minus’ breakout debut, 2020’s acts of rebellion, a record whose fragile, blurry intimacy was tied to a year of pandemic isolation. Though it revs up every strain of electronic music the producer and singer-songwriter, born Gabriela Jimeno, likes to toy with – from icy synthpop to sinewy ambient to brazen electroclash – the new album only vows to dig deeper. In hindsight – and by expanding the setting of her creative process to include not only her native Colombia but also the Mojave Desert, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, Mexico City, and London – she grew warier of the blind optimism that spreads through the genre and sought to punch through the façade of her own project. “Writing DÍA I thought, ‘Wait, who am I really?’” she said. Definitive or not, the answer it provides is heartfelt, gritty, and self-affirming. Read the full review.
Trash Mountain is named after a pink house sitting on a decommissioned landfill site at the back of Burlington, Vermont’s Old North End, which Lily Seabird has called home for several years now. Rough-hewn yet warmly realized, the album centers on Seabird’s captivating voice as it lingers on a moment, trembles in grief, or sighs around a melody for just that bit more relief. “Where the wind blows everything I try to remember and forget/ On the edge of town/ Where when I’m home I rest my head” is how she describes Trash Mountain, recording to bask in its comfort a little longer. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Lily Seabird.
Plenty of popular music has taught us that fame can be isolating, but Brendan Yates has been singing about loneliness way before the breakout success of 2021’s Glow On. What’s changed with their new album Never Enough, which has received a more muted but still loving response, is the vantage point. “This is where I wanna be/ But I can’t feel a fuckin’ thing,” Yates declares on its track ‘Sunshower’. While seeing them live in the wake of Glow On provided a rare example of how jubilant and light-hearted moshing can be, the remarkable thing about seeing them at the same festival right after the release Never Enough was how similarly riled-up the audience could get despite the overriding melancholy of the new songs. Never Enough sounds a hell of a lot like Glow On, except the rip-roaring songs are phased out by tastefully meditative synth passages, or playfully augmented by horns. It still works, above all, because the underlying sentiment rings true.
Linear progression is generally a myth, yet one often projected onto artists, who must continually level up their sound without straying from their original vision. The Beths have indeed tightened, coloured, and expanded their approach since their 2018 breakout Future Me Hates Me, and while they’re not quite making a statement about their own trajectory with Straight Line Was a Lie, the titular realization extends to the way they handle both lyrics and instrumentation: careening between the immediacy, anxiety, and tenderness of their previous albums, but leaving space for different shades of weariness and anhedonia, a void that doesn’t dull so much as activate a new side of New Zealand quartet’s sound. “Let me be weak/ With a sad tear drying on my cheek,” Liz Stokes sings on ‘Best Laid Plans’, closing out an album all about gathering the strength to let it roll down. Read the full review.
65. Hayden Pedigo, I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away
I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away is hardly a solitary affair. Along with William Tyler collaborator Scott Hirsch, Pedigo brought together a group of musicians that includes violinist Nathan Bieber, pianist Jens Kuross, pedal steel player Nicole Lawrence, and “phaser suggester” Forest Juziuk. But while the arrangements are richly spacious and uniformly warm, Pedigo ensures nothing overshadows the simple majesty of his fingerpicking, which hums to its own rhythm. Written on a 20,000-acre in Wyoming, Pedigo shades in the vacuum of memory like there’s just as much beauty in forgetting as remembering, in observing landscapes through a window and noticing them blur together in your mind. Without saying a single word, no album in 2025 could make you more at ease with the passage of time.
Over the past decade or so, U.S. Girls have carved a lane as one of the most critically acclaimed alt-pop projects thanks to Meg Remy’s graceful, razor-sharp, and increasingly accessible songwriting. But what if, as Remy puts it on the final song of their new album Scratch It, “to live is to lose face”? For the Toronto-based artist, the question extends from a loose catalog of shame, vulnerability, and powerlessness often relating to her life as a performer, but also a diffusion of that same identity through the fuzzy, fascinating lens of history. Recorded on 16-track tape in Nashville with Dillon Watson on guitar, Jack Lawrence on bass, Domo Donoho on drums, and Jo Schornikow and Tina Norwood on keys, it’s unburdened and free-flowing, suggesting there’s so many ways to make a U.S. Girls record; and so many ways, of course, to live and grow yourself without losing it.
Following 2021’s kaleidoscopic one hand on the steering wheel the other sewing a garden, relentless touring forced Ada Lea to restructure her life and priorities as a musician, which is not to say she stopped writing songs – in fact, she wrote over 200 over a period of three years, 16 of which made it onto the new album, and most of which originated in the Songwriting Method, a community-based group she kept up that required submitting songs with a deadline. On songs like ‘it isn’t enough’, you can almost hear her rushing to get a song down before midnight, singing, “Today I lost/ Today is gone/ Today I really fought.” Far from impatient or forced, however, when i paint my masterpiece sounds unhurried and precious, glad not to have slipped into past tense. Read our inspirations interview with Ada Lea.
The follow-up to 2022’s Classic Objects, named after a fragrance made by Maruice Roucel for the French perfumerie Serge Lutens, doesn’t dwell on Jenny Hval’s love of perfume but draws on it as a means of interrogating her relationship with performance. Though ISM has evocative properties for Hval, she was more directly inspired by a comment she came across online that it “would be what the ghost in Hamlet could wear.” It resonated with her, she said, “because it was how I thought of myself as an artist — a ghost from a time when music mattered, still hammering away — and my record, which to me was sounding ghostly and was invaded by hazy, smoky and powdery textures.” Vaporous and haunted, Iris Silver Mist is also gripping and sensuous enough to convince you that it still matters, here and now. Read the full review.
In the first hours of 2023, S.G. Goodman found herself explaining the old practice of ‘Planting by the Signs’ to the two people left in her living room after a New Years Eve gathering: her friend and mentor Mike Harmon, and his partner of twenty years, Therese. The Foxfire books, which richly lay out the ancient beliefs, were stacked beside them, and Goodman already knew she wanted to base her next album around what was intrinsically passed down to her through her Kentucky upbringing: the implicit importance of timing everyday acts in accordance with the cycle of the moon. The concept seeps into every corner of her poised, poignant new album, so much so that it is named after it – and even if the listener remains ignorant of it, there are traces of a kind of elemental power in its striking, dreamlike production, courtesy of Goodman and longtime collaborators Drew Vandenberg and Matthew Rowan. Read our inspirations interview with S.G. Goodman.
Catchy and aggressive from the get-go, Smut‘s music softened on How the Light Felt, their second LP and first for Bayonet, where catharsis was tinged with melancholy and draped in various shades of shoegaze. They cut back on the haze on their latest album, Tomorrow Comes Crashing, still well-versed in the nuances of dreamy music but dialing the intensity back up when necessary – earnestly vacillating between the confidence and self-doubt, even when the latter fuels some of their most visceral performances. Invigorated by the new lineup and a keen-eared producer in Aron Kobayashi Ritch (Momma), Smut recorded the album in Brooklyn just shortly after Roebuck and Min got married back home – and they play their hearts out. However much nostalgia is still baked into Tomorrow Comes Crashing, the future is what keeps them pulsing. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Smut.
“I never lie in my songs,” Cass McCombs repeats on ‘I Never Dream About Trains’, a highlight from Interior Live Oak, his 11th album, which means he has certainly released over a hundred. Lest you take his words at face value, the odd specificity of the ensuing lyrics should elicit some skepticism (“I never dream about holding you tight/ On the sand in Pescadero”). What he sings on the previous song, though, is much closer to the truth: “I mean everything I say, or something quite like it.” The meaning of Interior Live Oak, a 12-song double album that follows 2022’s excellent but much more concise Heartmind, remains elusive, but McCombs manages to weave it all together, singing through a cast of unreliable narrators that only cement his own musical consistency and earnestness. They are dancers and cynics, real and imagined, brutally honest and spiritually truth-bearing. If they all, at times, seem buried in sleep, that’s because dreams, they say, have no lies to hide. Read the full review.
The title of Humour‘s debut album is taken from a line from discarded songabout Andrea Christodoulidis’ decision to start learning the language as a second generation Greek, and though he spends most of the album screaming in an American accent that bears out the characters he’s inhabiting, you can hear him speaking it a bit in conversation with his father on the eponymous track, where they read Andreas Embirikos’ poem On Philhellenes Street. “This searing heat is necessary to produce such light,” he writes of the overwhelming weather in Athens, not unlike how Humour’s alluring, dreamlike hooks and tender revelations radiate through their blistering post-hardcore. Christodoulidis amalgamates personal, familial, and mythological stories much in the same way the group bridges styles, resulting in a record that is as fiercely heartfelt as it is surrealist, and, well, humorously absurd. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Humour.
After more than a couple of influential records in the increasingly saturated shoegaze genre – 2021’s self-titled LP, 2022’s a blip, and 2023’s in/out – Total Wife did the opposite of fading into obscurity, signing to Philadelphia label Julia’s War and cementing their status with their latest, come back down. It’s a breathlessly inventive and unconventionally dreamy record whose tides are difficult to predict or even identify – mind-melting guitars that get blown out and repurposed as synths, vocals whispered right beside your ear then chopped to oblivion, and a fluid rhythmic backbone evoking, to quote their song ‘rest’, “the beat in between my restlessness.” Pitched between jittery alertness and the edge of sleep, come back down is also a riveting expression of the duo’s dynamic compositional and lyrical instincts, a force that grounds the record in its malleable, blurry transcendence. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Total Wife.
keiyaA was feeling numb as the hype around her last album, 2020’s Forever, Ya Girl, began to die down, when she came across a post by writer Mandy Harris Williams: “a downward spiral is a loaded spring.” He was citing the concept in physics that became the title of, and poetic fuel for, the Chicago-born singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist’s latest album, hooke’s law. Building on the avant-R&B vision of her debut, it’s a dazzling portrait of jadedness unlike any in the genre while remaining absolute playful, both in its lush experimentation and silly one-liners. It’s not claustrophobic, exactly, so much as club music from the bottom of an emotional well. “I toast to lighten up the pain,” she offers on the closing track, “Until we meet again/ Start again.”
55. Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory, Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory
Subtlety is a virtue in the singer-songwriter world. In the face of a dying earth, however, and energized by collaborating for the first time in a writing capacity with her live band, the Attachment Theory – Devra Hoff on bass and vocals, Jorge Balbi on drums and machines, and TEEN’s Teeny Lieberson on synth, piano, guitar and vocals – Sharon Van Etten has made one of her boldest and biggest-sounding records to date. Sharon Van Etten & the Attachment Theory is as thunderous as it is propulsive, disquieting in its storm of existential questions but deliberate in how it sequences them; sounding like doubt at times, despair at others. But at its most resonant, Van Etten’s voice soars with pure wonder, unburdened by judgment or an easy way out: “Oh, what it must be like.” She’s singing about Southern life here, but really, about compassion – one of the few things that still doesn’t come attached with an expiration date. Read the full review.
Building on 2023’s Live at Bush Hall, Forever Howlong leverages Black Country, New Road’s fluidity as a band with a heightened level of precision and strikes a subtler balance between sonic lightness and emotional intensity. With vocals, and largely songwriting, now split between Tyler Hyde, Georgia Ellery, and May Kershaw, the album serendipitously, yet potently, coalesces around a female perspective, but the experiences they relay reach far beyond these three women. It’s in the loneliest moments that you hear them band together, all playing out time. Read the full review.
53. Asher White, 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living
More than continuously toeing the line between styles, between coherence and abstraction, Asher White’s music has evolved to prioritize confessional transparency over purity, complexity over wilful obfuscation. That may seem counterintuitive when talking about her latest album, 8 Tips for Full Catastrophe Living – her 16th overall and first for Joyful Noise – itself an unconventional and anxious reaction to a potential breakout moment, pushing her approach to its eruptive, feastful limits. More than just revealing, its recklessness opens the door to a fascinating place that’s bound to change shape with each subsequent release. If you’re dedicated enough to follow its twists and turns, you’ll want to come back for another look. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Asher White.
Diving into Weatherday’s latest outing, Hornet Disaster – which stretches over an hour and 16 minutes – is a daunting task, but the Swedish experimentalist sounds more exacting, determined, and addictive than ever. Six years after Sputnik’s debut LP under the moniker, Come In, and just a few after an impressive split EP with Asian Glow, the 19-track LP’s replayability justifies its overwhelming length, while the density of its noise-pop is made legible by intense and equally uncompromising emotion. “Our heartbeats in sync/ Our only real link,” they sing about halfway through the record. After just a single listen, you can’t help but clap along, enmeshed but blissful in the shared chaos.
You don’t always know what Horsegirl are singing about, but you know someone in the group does. Perhaps more than anything, their sophomore album, Phonetics On and On, delights in and charms through its deceptively childlike and unwaveringly playful language, which spins choruses out of practically every variation of “da da da.” Having moved from Chicago to New York between albums, the trio enlisted musician/producer Cate Le Bon to pare down and declutter the sound of 2022’s Versions of Modern Performance while amping up the absurdity in the subtlest places. Through the uncanniness and restraint, though, shines naked emotionality. “It’s oh so plain to see,” Nora Cheng sings at the very end, “How often I think sentimentally.” Whether repeating or tangling up the same words, Horsegirl make you want to sit down and listen. Read the full track-by-track review.
Sparks fly all over Sounds like…, Florry’s second album with Dear Life Records. It’s impossible to deny on the record’s euphorically charged, lyrically intriguing opener, ‘First it was a movie, then it was a book’, but there’s plenty of magic to be found as the Vermont-based septet loosens up on the rest of the record. Like pretty much every album coming out of Asheville’s Drop of Sun Studios, this one, co-produced with Colin Miller, sounds lived-in and magnetic. There is a rawness, at times even an explicit emptiness, in bandleader Francie Medosch’s lyrics, but it’s hardly something to stop the band dead in its tracks. “I was hoping to use this song to talk about/ Something that had been going on but I could not get it out,” she sings on ‘Dip Myself in Like an Ice Cream Cone’. Something like it, still, spills out.
Perhaps the follow-up to Hotline TNT’s 2023 breakout Cartwheel wouldn’t sound so bright, anthemic, and grandiose – in other words, uninterested in sticking to stylistic trappings – had the lovely sentiments of its predecessor not been amplified by devotion and confidence, not to mention the dynamism of Will Anderson’s touring band joining him in the studio. After many months of the road, the frontman was eager to return to the familiar, for him, introverted process of making another album, but guitarist Lucky Hunter, bassist Haylen Trammel, drummer Mike Ralston, and producer Amos Pitsch convinced him otherwise. If nothing else, Raspberry Moon is evidence that at least sometimes, such a leap of trust – for the people in the songs no less than the ones making them – pays off. Read the full review.
The Antlers’ new album, Blight, widens the scope of Peter Silberman’s songwriting by reckoning with environmental catastrophe, taking cues from a range of science fiction media. But it begins in a homey place: the unsparing intimacy of Silberman’s voice, admitting to the ways he’s contributing to the destruction by simply going about his day, the way you might be when you first press play on the record: having a meal, ordering it. If you have mourned with the psychological devastation of 2009’s Hospice or 2011’s Burst Apart, it is disarming and powerful to hear his soulful whisper carrying the same weight in this conceptual framework. Though when Blight spirals toward a series of ambiguous apocalyptic events, it once again feels not conceptual but psychological, the sound of ecological anxiety – corrosive, wordless, outstretched – turning what could be a familiarly delicate (by the Antlers’ standards) listen into an eerily fragile one. Read our inspirations interview with The Antlers.
The third and titular rule of Don’t Tap the Glass is the most ambiguous, which is somewhat reflective of the overall balance the record strikes: it’s a straightforward rap-party project whose kineticism is undeniable, but, arriving less than a year after the densely packed Chromakopia, it also can’t help but attach itself to Tyler’s self-mythologizing canon in mature, often meta ways. The albumshould keep longtime fans engaged long after the party’s over, but for at least the 29 minutes that it’s on, it both lifts you up and cools you down. Good dance music not only gets your body moving, but makes you forget yourself for a moment. For an artist as conscious of his ego as Tyler, the Creator, that’s no small feat. Read the full review.
With a title like Bugland, it feels lazy to call No Joy’s new album playful. It’s really the way Jasamine White-Gluz’s work registers as a playground that’s so thrilling: a place that triggers fuzzy memories, a fantastical portal, a wild abstraction with no equivalent in the real world. Beyond their shared musical interests and boundless genre-hopping – having the most fun in the islands of nu metal, shoegaze, and pop music – it’s where her approach intersects with Fire-Toolz’s Angel Marcloid, who co-produced the Motherhood follow-up not just with wide-eyed maximalism but true enthusiasm. It’s a wonder to hear them play and burst into a swirl of emotions mostly antithetical to the project’s name, to linger and rush out of them – maybe cutting the word in half does it more justice – fully.
Great Grandpa‘s music sounds so splendid, the lyrics so fantastically poetic, it’s easy to undermine their intimacy. “It’s closer when I see you, damn,” goes the hook on ‘Emma’, a highlight on their latest album Patience, Moonbeam, and they return to that damn for a cathartic explosion on the single ‘Doom’. The band’s first album in six years yearns and plays around for a sense of euphoria, and even if it sometimes falls short – of the feeling, not reeling you in – their synergy achieves a kind of unburdening that feels like a gift. “All dark things in time define their meaning,” Al Menne sings on ‘Kid’, making Pat and Carrie Goodwyn’s mournful lyrics sound tenderly affirming. “And fold sharp ends/ Into their mouths.” Read our track-by-track interview with Great Grandpa.
Way before it was meticulously sequenced, Sinister Grift – Panda Bear’s first record to feature all his AnCo bandmates, with notable appearances from Cindy Lee, Spirit of the Beehive’s Rivka Ravede (Lennox’s partner), and his daughter Nadja – began with Lennox and his co-producer and lifelong friend Deakin (Josh Gibb) laying down material in his newly built studio in Lisbon. Like its ecstatic take on heartbreak, the record reconfigures country tropes, classic rock chords, and reggae rhythms without quite distorting or diluting them. It sounds at ease with its menace and disconcerted by its playfulness, and these are all words you can twist around every time you press play.
As far as Oneohtrix Point Never records go, Tranquilizer’s most immediate antecedent is Replica, an album that’s almost a decade and a half old. While that collection saw Daniel Lopatin wistfully repurpose sounds from bootleg DVDs compiling TV commercials from the ‘80s and ‘90s, Tranquilizer mines from a set of commercial sample CDs preserved on the Internet Archive. The flimsiness of that maintenance – the page was taken down, then suddenly came back – is part of what inspired the producer and differentiates his follow-up to Again, the way swathes of potentially soulful music can be lost to and resurface through time. Read the full review.
It’s been five years since the Ophelias’ last album, Crocus, but its follow-up, Spring Grove, is by no means a post-pandemic document. Spencer Peppet’s lyrics burrow much deeper into past wounds, burdened by dreams that recur without end or explanation, blurring the line between the present moment and what’s clearly come to pass. When the titular Spring Grove cemetery comes up, it is in reference to the summer of 2014, yet as if neither person would now be the first to speak. “The feeling of you haunts me and I/ Know that I can recognize that,” she confesses on new single ‘Cicada’, and the whole record gives it shape even when the ghosts cease to follow. Read our interview with the Ophelias.
Deftones’ 10th album – and best in years – deftly balances their signature brutality and lushness. The follow-up to 2020’s relatively muted Ohms was produced by Nick Raskulinecz, who previously worked on 2010’s Diamond Eyes and 2012’s Koi No Yokan, and reminds us that no band can make cataclysmic music sound quite as sumptuous. On standout ‘milk of the madonna’, Chino Moreno invokes bloody rain, thunder, quaking winds, and most of all fire, sounding utterly consumed yet invigorated by the pummeling force of the instrumentation. “The display ignites your mind,” he sings. How could it not?
40. Ethel Cain, Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You
Ethel Cain‘s latest album is billed as the prequel to her 2022 breakthrough Preacher’s Daughter, a debut album that served as the beginning of a trilogy following three generations of women. If Willoughby Tucker “closes the chapter” on Anhedönia’s alter ego, as she has claimed, it’s an unwaveringly tender and astounding portrait, caught between nostalgia and dreams of violence, tangled yet steadfast in its romantic beliefs. And while she has framed the ambient-leaning Perverts as a standalone project, it also acts as a musical bridge to the new album, which balances her atmospheric and narrative world-building. Cain can’t help but draw a line from love straight to death, but not without submerging herself in it. Read the full review.
The title of Agriculture’s astounding new album is lifted from the statement that’s printed onto their T-shirts: “I love the spiritual sound of ecstatic black metal by the band Agriculture.” On the follow-up to their 2023’s self-titled LP, the Los Angeles band toys with the technical boundaries of the genre and stretches its transcendent power, partly by digging through the muck of how it feels to love its intense extremes. Shifting between and blurring the visions (and vocals) of main songwriters Dan Meyer and Leah Levinson, its waves are unpredictable but frequently exultant in their chaotic spawl. The most fitting metaphor arrives on the closing track, which ends with the proclamation: “Sometimes I’m lifted and sometimes they crash down on me/ I’m totally out of control/ With a mouth full of water.” Rad the full review.
During the pandemic, facing complications from myalgic encephalomyelitis and long COVID, Jasmine Cruickshank underwent heart surgery and was bed-bound for almost half a year. It was then that she decided to come out as trans, end her abusive marriage, and escape to Manchester, where she found – and was able to write through – her queer community. Backed by an all-trans band, jasmine.4.t. became the first UK signee to Phoebe Bridgers’ label Saddest Factory Records, and Bridgers, Dacus, and their boygenius bandmate Julien Baker all produced her remarkable debut full-length, You Are the Morning. Treading the line between intricate, tender-hearted folk and stormy indie rock, the album swoons with the rush of new love, spins catharsis out of the wildest lows, and reimagines the past into a light-filled future. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with jasmine 4.t.
First, Bon Iver reframe the entirety of last year’s SABLE, EP by repurposing it as the prologue to their fifth studio album. Throughout it, Justin Vernon puts a lot of stock in that prefix: things are perpetually jumbled, but they can be remade, maybe even replaced. Each new path buzzes with possibilities, but fABLE does away with the fear and paranoia these can stir up, attaching itself, miraculously, to an abundance of joy. It’s clear-headed and radiant, drawing upon elements of soul and R&B that Vernon has harnessed before, but never with such refreshing immediacy and purpose. “Seek the light,” he urged all those years ago, and damn it if he won’t keep looking. He’s in such good company, after all, and it’s showing more than ever. Read the full review.
For nearly an entire hour, Through the Wall barely changes up its groove. Remaining sultry and poised, Rochelle Jordan’s incadescent, scintillating new album anchors in a tasteful fusion of R&B and deep house that many attempted but none executed as faithfully as, the Los Angeles-based, British-Canadian singer-songwriter this year. Hooking you in with some of the most tempered – and temptatious – pop choruses of the year, Jordan doesn’t try to prove you won’t hear a better club record this year. She just swings into action, eager to take up space.
Samia introduced her third album by tracing a line between the inexplicable phenomenon of bloodless cattle mutilation – ‘Bovine Excision’ – and her own experience of womanhood. Though there are pockets of Bloodless that remain a mystery no matter how many times you listen or scrutinize the lyrics – too many poetic turns of phrase, contexts erased, men blurring together – the bigger draw is Samia’s unique ability to turn the inexplicable into the phenomenal; to make beauty out of a void, not necessarily by filling it. It may leave you with more questions than it answers, yet it astounds and surprises you at every turn. The songs rip straight through the heart – even if you have no idea how they even got there.
More than a surefire hit that’s capable of carrying a whole album, ‘9 2 5’ serves as a thesis statement for The Passionates Ones, whose title should stave off those without that kind of fire in their hearts. Slotted right in the middle of the record, it paints a typical portrait of an artist struggling to overcome systemic challenges to “manifest a vision,” while everything around it explores more personal, nuanced shades of it: “I dreamed this life, now I’m scared to live it,” Marcus Brown admits on ‘It’s Time’. Flitting between R&B, jazz, funk, and hip-hop, Brown’s eclecticism ensures the songs are radiant enough to prevent the fear from taking over – so they all shine just as bright.
On the first song of their self-titled debut album, Wet Leg were feeling uninspired, beaten down, and zoned out, equating it all to the same oddly desirable state: ‘Being in Love’. Three years later, the Isle of Wight five-piece – helmed by Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers – open their sophomore album by reevaluating: being in love isn’t a thing you “kinda like.” It’s an emergency. It makes you sound ravenous, maniacal, silly, and melodramatic, all adjectives that describe moisturizer even as Wet Leg maintain their deadpan humour and offbeat aesthetic. Yet the record, once again produced by Dan Carey, softens into and soaks up its pleasures and contradictions, the way it can appear fantastical even as the sobering reality kicks in. What ‘Being in Love’ describes as “some kind of fucked up trip” is just “happy comatose,” which isn’t a bad slogan for moisturizer. Apply gently; it just might do you good.
Luminescent Creatures takes its name from the closing track of Ichiko Aoba’s previous effort, 2020’s Windswept Adan, an enchanting and richly rendered record that expanded both the Japanese singer-songwriter’s palette and audience. Working with arranger Taro Umebayashi and creative director Kodai Kobayashi, Aoba’s ambitious vision for that project included a script for an imaginary movie, telling the story of a girl who is exiled to Adan Island. By the end, Aoba wrote in the album’s companion book, “the body of the girl had vanished instead, transformed and reborn into a variety of living things.” That may leave the island uninhabited by humans, but Aoba has no trouble furthering the fantastical journey, breathing music into all other life forms that permeate the universe she’s built around it. Read the full track-by-track review.
Essex Honey is probably too eclectic to sound like the music you grew up with, but it certainly feels like it. “Regressing back to times you know/ Playing songs you forgot you owned,” Dev Hynes sings on ‘Westerberg’, a key line on an album that digs through memory by interpolating songs from acts including the Replacements, Yo La Tengo, Elliott Smith, and Everything But the Girl’s Ben Watt. Just as evocative are the variably abstract passages of piano and cello, the first instruments Hynes ever played. Foggy, fatigued, yet clear-eyed, Blood Orange’s first record since Angel’s Pulse vaguely revolves around returning to a formative place in the wake of grief, struggling to hold anything in its grip. Yet slipping through the cracks, and the sadness, are memories that offer relief even if you can’t quite place them, as well as a cast of familiar voices that may seem distant but help in embracing it.
As the most pioneering band in modern shoegaze, TAGABOW could capitalize on a fantastical, watered-down version of a sound that’s only getting more popular, especially on their first LP for a bigger label in NYC’s ATO Records. They could shroud everything in glitchy layers of artifice and mutter poetic lyrics that mean nothing for the rest of their careers. Douglas Dulgarian’s way of avoiding that was making a record he’s deemed “too real” – confessional, euphoric, and achingly, nauseatingly beautiful. “I finally feel the comforting, familiar feeling of potential sleep rising up through the bile in my throat,” he says on the first song of a record filled with truths that are hard to stomach. But there’s hardly a feeling of finality to it – against all odds, it’s another fruitful beginning. Read the full review.
Jane Remover could have spent several albums coasting on, even softening, the blend of shoegaze and bedroom pop that made 2023’s Census Designated a success. Instead, the experimental artist cemented their status by pushing everything – including the limits of those genres, but also rap, pop, and club music at large – to the red. Revengeseekerz puts its money on the feverish excess and self-referentiality that could deter fans who came on board with the last album, but the unbounded rawness that rises to the fore makes this record an absolute blast. It’s explosive and dexterous in ways that put the self above everything: “Might close up shop,” Jane sings ‘Fadeoutz’, “if it means I can live my life.”
Sudan Archives’ lavish, ambitious world keeps expanding on THE BPM, but not at the expense of vulnerability – quite the opposite. Broadly speaking, the virtuoso’s third LP is as inventive as her 2022 breakout Natural Brown Prom Queen, but it also at times feels like a totally different album: wilder and more confounding its musical swings, more existential in its post-breakup candor. Sudan and her collaborators’ production is hypnotic and breathless with ideas without ever falling out of sync with the singer’s emotional overflow. “Sometimes I can get real low but I am high right now,” she sings on ‘Los Cinci’, prizing every point on the spectrum equally.
On Maria Somerville‘s 4AD debut, Luster, there’s hardly a line between pristine songs and spacious atmospherics. The Irish musician is an expert at diffusing it, just like her curiosity towards the natural world wafts into her internal one. The follow-up to 2019’s All My People is lush, liminal, and luminous, all those “l” words that earn the record its title. Even at its most reserved, it expands beyond the sense of solitude it seems to be inspired by, rendering it one of the most inviting – and best – dream pop albums released this year.
“The foolish hope of great eternal beauty,” Anna von Hausswolff sings on ‘Facing Atlas’, reaching her highest register, “This shit breaks my heart.” As epically ambitious as the Swedish musician’s latest effort is, it’s no more high-minded than any other depiction of heartbreak, except in framing it as the equivalent of the sky splitting in two. The atmosphere is so imposing and dense it justfies the unyielding desparation in von Hausswolf’s voice, which hardly ever relaxes. Why would when it seems like the only thing that can power through the cacophony? In starting over, the singer finds better places to store her pure, frantic hope.
“I’m ready to feel like I don’t have the answers,” Lorde sings on Virgin’s opening track, ‘Hammer’. That doesn’t mean she’s not searching, but on the pop star’s first album in four years, she embraces that feeling. When she sings of the “peace in the madness over our heads,” it’s not reflective of the kind of healing journey that polarized listeners on 2021’s Solar Power so much as beginning to accept it in messy, sometimes subdued, occasionally blissful fashion. While Lorde’s shortest album to date, it is far from her least impactful, mirroring the fluidity she’s discovering in her gender expression and carrying wounds both self-inflicted and relational: hazy yet thorny, guttural yet ambiguous, that self glitching in and out of view yet somehow sounding impervious in its vulnerability. Read the full review.
Though Kathryn Mohr‘s music remains insular in nature, every record she’s made since 2021’s As If has required some sort of separation from home: she laid down her 2022 EP, Holly, produced by Midwife’s Madeline Johnston, in rural Mexico, whose desert environment had a palpable influence on the music. Her debut full-length, Waiting Room, was not only self-recorded but also conceived over the course of a month in eastern Iceland, as Mohr wove together songs in a windowless concrete room of a disused fish factory. The effect of the place is captured visually on the album cover and sonically through Mohr’s use of field recordings and imagistic writing, but the record only burrows further inward, at once liminal and confrontational, embodied and otherworldly. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Kathryn Mohr.
The world of Destroyer‘s Dan’s Boogie is one of sweeping beauty tumbling towards erasure. “‘There’s nothing in there/Everyone’s been burned,” Dan Bejar sings on ‘The Ignoramus of Love’. “I remix horses.” That third line, which nods to the Bill Callahan song ‘I Break Horses’ and reimagining Patti Smith’s Horses, is evidence of how other pieces of music – as well as film and literature, the boundaries being so blurred in Destroyer’s estimation – permeate Bejar’s subconscious lyrical process. You can’t always trace a direct connection between them as a listener, but you also can’t shake off the way a particular tangle of words, sounds, or images might have bled into Bejar’s madcap expression. It’s Destroyer at their most undiluted and fearless, and the results are both satisfyingly murky and illuminating. Read our inspirations interview with Destroyer.
22. Amaarae, Black Star
“I’m a material bitch,” Amaarae declares on ‘100DRUM’, “but I know the worth of a mind.” On ‘B2B’, she repeats the word “heart” more times than probably any body part mentioned on her new album. And yes, it’s called Black Star and Naomi Campbell appears on one song, but its best track is probably the PinkPantheress duet, which says a lot about its yearning emotionality. Black Star is as exuberant, reckless, and lavish as the Ghanaian American visionary’s major label debut, Fountain Baby, but it’s also mindful and sensitive as it expands on her globalist, Afrodiasporic vision of club music. The more time she spends in the club, the softer – yet no less inventive – her music becomes. You can get off a dozen different drugs, she knows, but no high can match that of a love that outlasts the rush. Read the full review.
As if titling a song ‘Fame Is a Gun’ isn’t enough provocation, Addison Rae opens it with the lines: “Tell me who I am/ Do I provoke you with my tone of innocence?/ Don’t ask too many questions/ That is my one suggestion.” It’s tempting to intellectualize Addison in the context of the TikTok-dancer-turned-pop-singer’s personal narrative, or the references she wears on her sleeves – Lana, Britney, Madonna – or even the stream of singles that sold more and more people on the prospect of Addison. But tune into Addison and it becomes clear that innocence is a synonym for sincerity, which is the main reason its every move and mood – euphoric and wistful, woozy and downcast – feels seamless; though working with the writer-producer duo of Elvira Anderfjärd and Luka Kloser across the record adds to the cohesion. Rae luxuriates in it all even as she maintains an air of detachment. She cares, of course – just don’t think too hard about it.
Up until now, Smerz records have tended to pique my interest, even amaze, then soon slipped from my mind. But Big city life, the Norwegian duo’s fuzzily glorious new album, clicked in immediately – and demanded repeated listens. Evocative of their experiences in New York and their hometown of Oslo, the record – playful and, to borrow one of the track titles, feisty – resonates on a wider scale. Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt’s eccentricity remains intact, layering one ambiguous feeling after another, but never without pulsing forward. “I’m realizing lately/ That I won’t feel like this again,” is the closing sentiment on ‘A thousand years’. Might be half-remembered, even imagined, but never anything less than real.
Set My Heart on Fire Immediately was the title of Perfume Genius’ 2020 studio album, and of course, there’s always the fear of burning out. ‘It’s a Mirror’, the confident lead single from his astounding new album Glory that marked a shift from the diffuse grooves of 2022’s Ugly Season, still bows down to the feeling of “a siren, muffled crying/ Breaking me down soft and slow.” But if there is a weariness seeping through the familiarly lush and vibrant tapestry of Glory – which reunites Mike Hadreas with producer Blake Mills, while elevating his backing band of Meg Duffy (Hand Habits), Greg Uhlmann, Tim Carr, Jim Keltner, and Pat Kelly – it’s not at the expense of catharsis, freedom, or indeed glory. The album is tender-hearted and open-ended, loosening into a level of directness that not only feels new for Hadreas, but gives even its heavier subjects a weightless air. “My entire life… it’s fine,” he sings on ‘No Front Teeth’. The affirming going to keeps hanging in the silence. Read the full review.
A selfie utilized as an album cover might be the first thing that strikes you about Blurr, making it no surprise the album carries the intimacy of a voice memo – and often sounds like it was recorded directly onto a cell phone. More than staring at yourself in the mirror or inside the screen of a tiny computer, however, Joanne Robertson’s latest release feels like shutting it off and catching your reflection in the blackness. Without any percussive accompaniment, it is full of rhythm, the coiling between her voice and guitar invoking the soul humming through the body: tender and tactile despite its fuzziness, temporal while stretching toward infinity. Oliver Coates’ string contributions, astonishing and meticulously placed, fill out the canvas as if in absolute certainty that endless place is not just reachable, but colours out the solitude.
Following last year’s Keeper of the Shepherd, Hannah Frances‘ fifth LP is another dazzling invitation into the singer-songwriter’s deeply interconnected world. Continuing her collaboration co-producer Kevin Copeland, Frances expands the earthy intricacies of her last album by leaning into graceful, winding maximalism; if her previous album was a solemn excavation of grief, familial dysfunction, and a turbulent upbringing, Nested in Tangles spirals outward instead of burrowing further in, creating a lush environment through which past and present selves can move and change shape. Gnarled, playful, and ultimately therapeutic, it knows when to breathe fire and softly exhale, nestle and branch out. “Recollections move through in sudden shifting shapes,” she intones on the final track, “I release into the unburdening.” Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Hannah Frances.
If the words Waxahatchee, Swearin’, or P.S. Eliot mean anything to you, the debut from Snocaps might be the best musical surprise of the year. It’s the return of the Crutchfield twins, whose first band, the Ackleys, made waves in Birmingham, Alabama when they were just 15. Allison sometimes plays as part of Waxahatchee, Katie’s biggest, now Grammy-nominated project, and they’ve promised to perform material from P.S. Eliot, their second band, on tour. They split their self-titled album’s tracklist evenly, ricocheting between their diverging (but never discordant) songwriting instincts. Backed by two musicians Katie worked with on her latest album, Tigers Blood, MJ Lenderman and Brad Cook, Snocaps is as warm and spontaneous as it is thorny and subtly miraculous. Read the full review.
In an interview promoting his new albumGuitar, which was released on the same day as Water From Your Eyes’ It’s a Beautiful Place, Mac DeMarco – the archetypal indie rock prankster, a label also applied to the NYC duo of Rachel Brown and Nate Amos – talked about “the Robin Williams effect.” He explained, “Robin Williams is all fun and games, and then you watch Good Will Hunting and you’re like—fuck. It’s good.” Funnily enough, Amos joked that Williams is “a silent member of Water From Your Eyes” in press materials because a poster from the Mork & Mindy era hangs in his bedroom, where he still makes all the music for WFYE, which now sounds bigger than ever. But the Robin Williams effect is also not a bad way of describing It’s a Beautiful Place, which is characteristically silly, freaky, and clunky – because what’s more awkward than making sci-fi indie rock about cosmic existentialism – until its vast emotional range hits you. Read the full review.
When Dijon sings that he’s on fire, you believe him. But it’s different from any other artist trying to sell the idea that lasting love has the power to obliterate all your insecurities. It’s chaotic, Dijon Duenas affirms, making swooning, infectious, dazzling R&B music that can sound on the verge of a breakdown even – or especially – at its most ecstatic. With help from Andrew Sarlo, Henry Kwapis, and Michael Gordon, the Los Angeles-based musician and producer has no issue fragmenting his most immediate hooks or rendering his voice unrecognizable when he’s most breathlessly trying to express himself. Whatever inspiration it owes to the past, Baby suggests you can no longer make beautiful, revelatory pop music without sounding at least a bit precarious or unwieldy.
Don’t let that cover artwork throw you off – take it as a warning sign. Though informed by sobriety, that newfound perspective edges the London-based electronic producer into an even more abrasive direction than her ketamine-fuelled 2021 debut, im hole. Because the reality of sobriety – its very soberness – can be even more horrifying, like a blinding light on the rear-view mirror where total fuckery is just a gasping breath or nightmare away. “I’ll never let myself forget/ They had me out on a witch-hunt/ When I found myself,” she intones on the opening track. aya’s production lets sounds – drawing from her childhood fascination with nu-metal and emo – ferment, spiral, and soften, only for her vocals to slice right through. It’s as wry as it is impossibly visceral and dazzling, like a manic dream you wouldn’t wake up from even if you could.
Hushed, gorgeous, and warmly elusive, Alex G‘s major label debut is a high watermark in a career full of them. There’s still a treasure trove of childhood memories for the singer-songwriter to dig up, to try and bridge the disparate pieces and fill the missing ones. “I’ve searched far and wide/ For a place like this/ Now I can close my eyes,” he sings at one point on Headlights. And what happens then, in the blackness? Maybe his voice thrives, writing out every word, rescuing his younger self. Maybe it gets all distorted, firing up his imagination. Maybe he’ll get dizzy with the big bright light; maybe he’ll miss the one glaring right at him. Read the full review.
11. Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band, New Threats From the Soul
After more than a dozen years of honing his songwriting with the band State Champion and a few experimenting with drum machines and weird synths, Ryan Davis sounds grounded yet unconstrained on his sophomore record with the Roadhouse Band, far removed from the romantic ideals of music yet deeply existential and strangely spiritual about it. The songs are not simple but wordy, knotty, and outstretched while hinging on some elemental truth. It may not bring back the feeling, but it might make you feel, as Davis later sings, “with the feelings that I don’t express.” That’s more than most music, now or ever, would joyfully bestow. Read the full review.
There’s no shame in describing the deepest of pleasures in simple language: “It feels nice,” FKA twigs declares on ‘Room of Fools’, a highlight off her third album EUSEXUA, while another track is called ‘Girl Feels Good’. But the pop iconoclast is as gifted at putting things succinctly as she is at nuanced expression of both body and soul, which is why she’s spent so much of the album’s rollout trying to describe the word she coined for it. The record may not be as loose as her 2022 mixtape CAPRISONGS, but certainly retains some of its clubby exuberance, as well as the spell-binding eroticism of LP1, in mapping that slippery state of being. That it’s a place worth exploring goes without saying. Read the full review.
On ‘Saturation Driver’, a highlight from La Dispute’s new album No One Was Driving the Car, disaster flicks play on a muted TV while nobody’s watching – except, that is, Jordan Dreyer’s camera-wielding narrator. Disaster – whether exploited for entertainment, untangling through time, or lost to history – is a fact of life; earlier on the record, Dreyer goes as far as to sing, “Every moment we’re alive a disaster/ A tragedy to be and breathe.” It is also a miracle, he later exalts; the follow-up to 2019’s Panorama is revelatory and windingly rapturous in that way, knotting the vicious truths and transcendent joys its characters are driven towards around the veil of memory, progress, and Christian fundamentalism. Read our inspirations interview with La Dispute.
That Bad Bunny would make an album that finds him reconnecting with the musical traditions of Puerto Rico, one that triumphantly doubles as a love letter to his motherland, is no surprise. But you barely have to scratch beneath the surface to acknowledge just how piercing, comprehensive, and ambitious of an effort Debí Tirar Más Fotos is – not only does it survey genres like salsa, plena, and música típica, but for those listening on YouTube, each of its accompanying 17 visualizers serves as a history lesson about Puerto Rican history. As musically rich as it is daring, the record also scans as one of Bad Bunny’s most personal, reeling from different kinds of loss, from cultural displacement to heartbreak. It’s way less of a detour than the global superstar reaching a new peak in predictably admirable fashion.
“Everything buffering, reality lag and jump/ Sometimes barely recognize the people I love,” billy woods raps on ‘Golgotha’, a line that cuts to the core of his hallucinogenic writing. The Brooklyn rapper articulates bad dreams, ghostly memories, and gloomy, cross-generational visions with strange lucidity, and while GOLLIWOG marks his first full-length effort without a primary collaborator in six years, he’s hardly alone in it. Sometimes it’s hard to trace who’s relaying whose story, how the past blurs into the present, though woods points to a tale about an evil golliwog – the racist caricature the record is named after – that he wrote as a child, remembering how his mother said it needed some work. So we get a challenging, unsparing 18-track record that stands among the all-timer’s very best.
Rosalía‘s fourth studio album is a towering epic, a four-movement work that draws inspiration from female saints and poets with “the intention of verticality.” But the most disarming, by pop standards, aspect of LUX isn’t the Spanish superstar’s spiritual and musical ambitions, or the way she folds them into a compelling structure, but its heart-rending sentimentality, apparent in both the dramatic ways she wields these stories and every small waver of her voice. That’s the quality of its operatic scope that cuts through on each listen, taking stock of her lived experience as much as it seeks to undress it and ascend to a new world. It’s a singular document of an artist at the top of her game, shamelessly looking to the past while confronting the oblivion of the future. Read the full review.
oklou‘s debut LP, choke enough, is eerily enchanting yet damn near impossible to pin down. The French-born, London-based vocalist and producer, born Marylou Mayniel, may have been honing in her leftfield stylings for a decade now, but the way she flavours every trace of genre on choke enough – which finds her working with A.G. Cook, Danny L Harle, and co-producer Casey MQ – gives it the feel of an instant avant-pop classic. As giddily lush and Y2K-infused as it is dreamily ambient – but above all vaporous – the record zones in on the experience of decentering from one’s self, the way it stretches over a period of years and the glimmers of life peaking through the cracks. It’s an album you can’t help but get lost in, yet it never totally loses itself, anchoring in a world of in-betweens.
If it sounds like the road is its own fateful character on Bleeds, it might have something to do with when and where it took shape. Entering the studio just a month after vocalist Karly Hartzman and guitarist MJ Lenderman broke up, the North Carolina band were recording off the back of an exhaustive touring schedule in support of 2023’s masterful Rat Saw God. With a couple of stylistic diversions, Wednesday‘s new album no doubt feeds off the gnarly, blazing energy of its predecessor, collaging another tangle of funny, tragic, beautiful stories. But reaching what sounds like a breaking point on the ferocious highlight ‘Wasp’ leads vocalist Karly Hartzman to be just as unsparing on the album’s more intimate moments. The band is about to embark on another tour, but Bleeds sounds like the equivalent of pulling over to let out a good scream. Read the full review.
“Not everything needs to even out.” The line stands out amidst the elusive tapestry of ‘Beautiful ending’, though the closer to caroline’s second album doubtlessly lives up to its titular promise. Not everything needs to resolve lyrically to make some sort of sense; not everything needs to line up musically to leave a mark on you. caroline 2 is a delightfully uneven yet meticulously crafted record, one that’s enamoured not so much with the disparateness of its parts as it is in the delicate act of stitching them together. In it you can hear empty spaces and vast stretches of time, people existing in the same room yet setting themselves adrift, bridging distances big and small. I can’t imagine not submitting yourself to its spell.
In the 1965 documentary Ladies and Gentlemen… Mr. Leonard Cohen, which follows the singer-songwriter around the age of 30, a TV interviewer asks what Cohen means when he says he tries to wake up in a state of grace. He describes it as “that kind of balance with which you ride the chaos that you find around you,” adding, “It’s not a matter of resolving the chaos, because there’s something arrogant and warlike about putting the world in order.” I kept thinking about his use of the word warlike as I spun Geese’s revelatory new album, Getting Killed, which wastes no time pointing to the carnage all around while spending most of it in a fervid, ludicrous freefall that fills the gaps between the bizarre chaos of 2023’s 3D Country and Cameron Winter’s solo album Heavy Metal. Read the full review.
feeo frames her fragile, eerily intimate songs against the backdrop of infinity. Cosmic possibilities and absurd injustices shimmer at the edges of Goodness, making its vision feel as wide as it is singular; yet the more microscopic details and emotional nuances the London artist homes in on, the more her sonic poems scan as small epics, oozing through the connective tissue of a deeper world. At 39 minutes, Theodora Laird’s full-length debut is astonishingly rich; it swirls, brews, and burrows, rewarding you the further you stay along with it. Her voice is invariably beautiful yet at times almost vaporized by its surroundings, as if everything is always hanging by an incredibly fine thread. But her discerning eye and sense of presence remain infrangible. “I’m only a witness,” she sings, bearing like few artists dare to.
Aviator is one of those games that look simple. It’s just a small plane, a line that climbs, and that one second where you either win big, or crash like that same plane. But the game has a personality. Not the loud kind. The subtle kind, the type that shows up only when your finger is hovering over the button and you realise you’re arguing with yourself.
Some players try to hide it, but you can always tell who plays fast and who plays patient. It’s like watching people walk into a room. Some rush, some float, some take their time because they’re pretending not to care even though they do. Aviator forces all of that out without saying a word. The multiplier goes up and suddenly everyone’s “style” becomes visible, even if they didn’t know they had one.
I’ve sat in rooms where the whole table watches the climb together. Nobody talks at first. They’re just reading the number like it’s giving them a message only they understand. Someone cashes early and pretends it was intentional. Someone else waits too long and then leans back like they always knew it would crash. These reactions are the style. Not the game. The people.
What makes Aviator interesting is that it doesn’t distract you with ten different things at once. No shiny animations begging for attention. No overly dramatic soundtracks trying too hard. It’s almost too bare. But that’s the trick. The simplicity gives the game its shape. You fill the empty space with your own behaviour. That’s where the tension comes from.
Most casino-style games are about outcomes. Aviator online feels more like watching your own decision-making in real time. The game is simple. You’re not. You start telling yourself stories. “This one feels like it will go further.” “Last round wasn’t fair.” “Just one more second.” And then you realise you’re negotiating with a cartoon plane on your screen like it’s personal.
The social part adds another layer. When the multiplier climbs past the comfort zone, people become strangely united. You hear someone breathe differently. Someone else laughs too loudly. A stranger types a comment that sounds confident but you can tell they’re shaking just like everyone else. It’s oddly human. Everyone is trying to look composed while their instinct is pulling the other way.
Aviator also exposes pacing. Some people play like sprinters. They jump in, jump out, quick moves, no attachment. Others play like marathon runners. They wait, watch, wait again, then suddenly make a decision that doesn’t match the last ten rounds. And some people, the ones who swear they’re “not emotional players,” are the first to chase a crash with a reckless stake just to test their luck. You see it happen in the small changes in posture or the longer hesitation before they tap the screen.
There is no right way to play it, which is probably why style becomes such a big part of the experience. The game doesn’t push you into a corner. It simply asks the same question over and over: “How long are you willing to trust yourself?” The climb is the same every time, but your answer rarely is.
And that’s really what gives Aviator its charm. Not the visuals. Not the rules. Not even the wins. It’s the way the game quietly reveals the parts of you that other games never reach. You walk in thinking you’re playing something simple. Turns out you’re learning your own rhythm, your own timing, your own weird habits under pressure.
Aviator isn’t stylish on the surface. But it brings out style in the people playing it. And that’s the part that keeps pulling them back.
Given the season, it’s no surprise that many of us are starting to get a lot more antsy about the topic of gifts. If you haven’t gotten that someone special in your life a gift yet, it might be because you want to ensure that it’s truly special and meaningful, but aren’t sure how to do that. Rather than focusing on buying them the most expensive thing that you can, it’s worth taking the time to sit down and think, look back on your observations of them as a person, and consider what it is that makes a gift feel meaningful in the first place.
Connect With Their Interests
Perhaps one of the easiest places to start is by thinking about their interests, whether it’s the hobbies they enjoy, particular media they feel a deep connection to, or any other passions that play an important role in their life. If you do pick a gift in this realm, however, do not overestimate how satisfying novelty gifts are. Things like t-shirts or signs with mottos that pay lip service to those interests often don’t show a true interest in them and, indeed, can sometimes feel like they’re mocking their passions. Dig deep and choose gifts that allow them to engage in the things they love more deeply, such as a rare ingredient for someone who loves cooking, or a beautifully bound edition of a reader’s favorite author. Treat their interests with the respect and love you want them to feel.
Add The Personal Touch With DIY Presents
If you want to create a one-of-a-kind gift that truly has your emotion and effort invested into it, then handmade gifts can easily be the way to go. They often have a sentimental quality baked right into them because of the time, creativity, and dedicated focus that they require. What you create might be based largely on what skills you can bring to the table, be it a knitted scarf, a piece of artwork, or even a curated scrapbook that can speak to the memories that you share with your loved one.
Think Of Things They Might Need But Wouldn’t Get Themselves
There’s a specific kind of gift where practicality and quality of life might be the main attraction, but you have to be careful with these, especially if they’re related to household chores. Few people are going to feel particularly catered to by a new mop, but if you invest in something that meets a lifestyle need of theirs that they might not readily invest in themselves, it can make a big difference. This could include a homeware item like a new coffee maker, a premium self-care product like a bath bomb bundle, or equipment that allows them to try out a hobby that they have been interested in. Pay attention to the things they might admire in stores or in ads, but show hesitation to pick up for themselves.
Consider Experiences, Not Just Physical Items
What do you get the person who seems to have everything they might need? A gift that brings new experiences might be the way to go. Immersive and luxurious experience gifts, such as spa days, wine-tasting tours, or tickets to a concert or play, can create memories they’ll take with them for years to come. Of course, you want to make sure that the experience is catered to the personality of the person you’re gifting. This might mean a weekend getaway for the more adventurous people or a wellness retreat for someone who secretly likes to be pampered. Getting enough tickets or places to join them can help you show that you’re interested in sharing those experiences with them, but you should also consider offering them the choice of who they bring with them.
Consider Their Values And Beliefs
Some people have needs that go a little higher than their own quality of life or wants. Their core values, be it faith, charity, or their cultural identity, might add a lot of meaning to their life. Even if you don’t necessarily share them, giving a gift that reflects those values can show a level of respect and care that goes a lot deeper than many presents This could be a donation to charity in their name for someone who has a cause they care deeply about, or a gift that enriches their spiritual life, like rosary beads or saint medals from Mondo Cattolico. It can be important for your loved ones to know that you respect and are mindful of the things that truly matter the most to them.
Celebrate Shared Memories
Many of the gifts above can focus on creating new memories with the person that you love, but there’s a lot to be said about revisiting fond memories, as well. Shared experiences can often be the strongest roots of the bonds we have with the people in our lives. Gifts that speak to those, such as a framed photo gallery for their wall, a custom illustration of a special moment, or the aforementioned scrapbook full of tokens of the times you’ve spent together, can bring out some very strong emotions, indeed.
Consider Acts Of Service
Actions can sometimes speak louder than words, especially if you want to ease the burden of a loved one who always puts others first, or to support them during a time of need. Offering to help with tasks like organizing a home space, planning an event, cooking meals, pet-sitting, or handling errands can feel incredibly meaningful. Many will even create little service boucher booklets for their loved ones to be able to redeem whenever they might need a little extra consideration, be it a night of babysitting or helping them with a project around the home. These gifts can show true care, love, and consideration for their wellbeing and needs beyond the simple unwrapping of a gift.
As the above points should show, there is no one notion of meaning that applies to all presents. Finding the meaning that you think works best for the recipient is the best way to go.
I still remember seeing, last year, the front page of The New York Times after Donald Trump’s election: “AMERICA HIRES A STRONGMAN.” Since then, it feels like the country has increasingly adopted power, strength and stubbornness as virtues, neglecting empathy, logic and sensitivity. It’s been distilled into the literary world, as writers bemoan the loss of the ‘male author,’ while other writers argue that’s not the case, or that male writers need to step it up anyway. I traveled to New York, then Philadelphia, to interview two authors whose books investigated a more relaxed methodology of manhood, and it was fun, in both instances, to be two men chatting about literary men. “Two men talking about masculinity—you instinctively laugh at that,” Andrew Lipstein told me.
Nevertheless, I was surprised that most of the books I put together for 2025’s best list were written by men; the rest are deeply concerned with masculinity in some form. There was cross-gender exploration in Jeff Weiss’s madcap tale that tracked the rise of early-aughts Britney Spears and E.Y. Zhao’s novel about Ryan Lo, her mysterious protagonist dissected through the eyes of others. In more straightforward forms, Kyle Seibel’s collection of short stories, Hey You Assholes, centers a rather pathetic maleness over a violent one; the father-son duo of Harris Lahti’s Foreclosure Gothic is fractured by their different visions of their legacies. In stories like C. Mallon’s Dogs, teenage angst muscles up against adult violence as Hal, a high school wrestler, pummels others in spite of his emotional vulnerability. The mosquito monster of Michel Nieva’s shapeshifting Dengue Boy could be seen as a transgender icon of body horror, ripping apart white-collared workers who consider themselves untouchable. There are, of course, many different ways to write about the myth of man.
“Let’s hear it for the man of the year,” Lorde sang on her new album, Virgin, both a taunt and a moment of self-actualization. Masculinity might be in crisis, a constantly evolving concept and legend, both problem and solution, but at least we got some good literature out of this reckoning to understand it better.
Political fiction is always a hard sell. Most of it is didactic, unsubtle, or woefully out of date, which is why I was pleasantly surprised with Mỹ Documents, the second novel from The Verge editor Kevin Nguyen, an astute and thrilling tale of plausible horror. In the near-distant future, a string of domestic terror attacks all perpetrated by Vietnamese people leads the government to enact internment camps for them, but broader American politics are not the centerpiece of the novel (thank goodness)—Nguyen’s characters are. A family falls askew as Jen is interned, but her older sister Ursula is not, and she relies on Jen’s documentation of the camps to advance her journalism career and keep breaking stories. Meanwhile, the Viets in the camp find their own ways—magazines, uprisings—to have their own fun. Fast-paced and, against all odds, enjoyable, Mỹ Documents is a parable for our times without being too entrenched in its madness.
Sexy and enigmatic, Simone and Ethan are the stars of Edwards University’s creative writing program—incoming students pine after them, reading their books that are probably about each other. But one, a cheeky student named Robbie who narrates the novel, attempts to join in on the fun and potentially disrupt their picture-perfect marriage, becoming entwined with Simone. Emily Adrian’s sly metafiction sees a relationship strengthening, determined to last through stellar conversations and genuine chemistry. It’s filled with the desperation of anyone who’s ever had a crush on their English teacher. Seduction Theory is a daring, enormously fun ride.
Horrific and disgusting, Michel Nieva’s story of a scorned, transgender humanoid mosquito who’s activated during a circlejerk at a boy’s camp might not be for everyone. But for all its graphic insanity, Dengue Boy spears technocapitalism, ecoterrorism, climate change and gender roles in its absurd, spiraling premise, ending with a showstopping diatribe on cosmic terror and fatalism. Dizzyingly quick and bizarrely propulsive, Dengue Boy is a fresh, freaky and often perverted novel, just how they should be.
Kyle Seibel roots for the loser. “Fucked by life” might be a crude descriptor, but many of the characters in his debut collection Hey You Assholes certainly seem to be—discharged soldiers, pushover husbands, Baghdadi restauranteurs, someone called “Fish Man.” Humanly observed by his time in the military and ability to conjure up quite the absurdity, Seibel’s clean characters turn from depressing to funny to melancholic very, almost astoundingly quickly. Make no mistake that Hey You Assholes is mostly about sad men in their sad stories, but it is astonishingly real. Forget the girl next door—it’s about the divorced neighbor guzzling beer in his garage. And isn’t he sort of a hero in his own right?
Andrew Lipstein’s freewheeling novel—loosely autofictional, as always—sees Reuben and Cecilie, married journalists, abroad in Copenhagen with their toddler, reconnecting with Cecilie’s old friend group and imagining a life divorced from America and all its humiliations (Reuben was recently caught giving his wife head on a work Zoom call). But wherever you go, there you are, and as he awkwardly integrates himself within her friends, he finds himself thinking about masculinity, spurned by a bawdy reporter named Mikkel, whom Reuben decides to interview. Not for any journalistic reason, just request to how to be more relaxed in a male body, something that is up in the air these days. In its exploration of how to live morally and manly, Lipstein’s witty and provocative Something Rotten is a rollicking, entertaining read—and always with a finger on the pulse.
Journalistic powerhouse Jeff Weiss’ first book could have been about anything, but he chose Britney Spears. It’s apt—she’s how he began his career, sneaking into the shoot for “…Baby One More Time,” Spears’ debut single; he never seems to shake her charm. Joining the hoards of tabloid reporters, Waiting for Britney Spears sums up his early writing career, shaking hands, standing in the VIP area, bumping into Timbaland in order to get the perfect shot—or mishap—from the teen icon. The boundary between Jeff the writer and Jeff the fan begins to blur; same with the one between reporter and harasser. Reasonably, he never gets too close, or maybe, he omits some of the facts—it’s “allegedly” a true story, anyway. But like the newspapers he published his Britney scoops in, Waiting for Britney Spears is pure entertainment. Are we no better than the industry that distorted itself around her, abusing and disrupting her life, squeezing out any last bit of gossip? Maybe it’s best not to ask.
I was hooked on whatever’s happening within Jessica Gross’ mind after devouring Hysteria, her 2020 debut novel where an unnamed narrator hallucinates her bartender to be the reincarnation of Sigmund Freud, then fucks him. Who wouldn’t be? Open Wide, her newest book, streamlines her eccentricities into a more accessible plot, but never skimps on the depravity; after falling madly in love, a podcaster splits her boyfriend down the middle via a gap in his teeth, crawling into him and sleeping there. But it gets better—and more titillating—that after he gets over the initial privacy shock, he seems to enjoy it too. Open Wide mixes sex and disgust so seamlessly you’re unable to separate them, and romance has never been so stomach-churning.
Deliciously plotted and shiveringly eerie, Harris Lahti throws you into the dusty, dark atmosphere of Hudson Valley house renovation. The father and son duo of Vic and Junior tackle dwellings that spook them; they quit and come back, even if it kills them. Foreclosure Gothic’s vignettes, by turnpoignant and tense, show Vic’s love of the game and reluctance to bow out for fear of letting his family down. Some, like when Junior decamps to Costa Rica to become a novelist, can stand their own as glimpses into their life, but thankfully Lahti expands on the pair choppily and distinctively. Foreclosure Gothic, with its unending dread, feels like doing manual labor on a haunted house during the horrors of 3pm. A bizarre, surreal, and sometimes disturbing look at legacy, labor and family.
Kaleidoscopic and wildly inventive, E.Y. Zhao’s debut Underspin is the sort of constantly shifting novel that keeps you on your toes and commands attention through its winding, beautiful prose. Ryan Lo, a teenage table tennis star who dies young, is glimpsed through the eyes of those who try—and usually fail—to understand him. Coaches, crushes, childhood friends, camp counselors and therapists all offer their insight into his psyche, but it’s still not enough to complete a full vision; Lo is at the heart of these stories, but Zhao’s dazzling Lazy Susan of ulterior characters make up the heart of this vibrant and dextrous novel. Every so often you come across someone who was born to write fiction; Underspin adds Zhao to the list.
“Misery,” Andrea Long Chu writes about Hanya Yanigihara’s novels, “has become airborne, passing aerosol-like from person to person while retaining its essential purpose—to allow the author to insert herself as a sinister kind of caretaker, poisoning her characters in order to nurse them lovingly back to health.”
A Little Life, Yanigihara’s most famous but not only novel about gay male suffering, is curiously no longer fashionable. Celebrated upon its publication in 2015 as a fearless chronicler of queer New York-based lives marked by trauma, her most recent novel, 2022’s To Paradise was received lukewarmly. Not only was it about similar themes, but the repetition of work suggested something other than authorial imagination—what Chu mentions as “sinister”—that paints Yanigihara as a sadist abuser.
I disagree with this read for multiple reasons; I find fault in A Little Life because it so desperately wants me to cry. Yanigihara, in concocting a blatantly helpless and pitiable character in Jude, oversteps her invisible hand in the writing process to the point of uncomfortability. I no longer feel this story is real, because it’s clear from the cavalcade of abuse and beatings that Jude is the hero and Yanigihara will abuse him until I feel sympathy. It’s all very simple.
On its surface, Dogs, the debut novel from C. Mallon, seems to follow the same theory. The five teen wrestlers at its center are broken, battered and bruised—and they’re as violent with each other as they are with themselves. One loses his hands, one dies, one crushes glass in his hand so that his mother will bandage the bleeding. They are, in a sense, tormented. But even though Mallon is successful in generating empathy for these characters, it never feels heavy-handed or deliberate to the point of parody; instead, it feels like she captured the unluckiest night of one teen boy’s life.
Hal, the stern but sensitive narrator, is descriptive and provocative while describing the inner turmoil that taunts any teen boy; his desire for Cody John, the group’s ringleader, keeps him both afloat and bewildered. “He was a cardinal bird,” Hal thinks, “I was a canyon.” Hal is desperately, madly in love with him while also harboring a self-hate for thinking—or being— this way in the first place. He’s nothing more than a “horsefly lassoed on a thread of gold,” desperate to keep hanging on until Cody John inevitably drops him.
The delicate balance of trauma and gut in Dogs, which focuses on the aftermath of one terrible night, makes it readable, but not overindulgent. These aren’t puppets to punch, but rather real people, and Mallon makes the use out of her book’s slim pagecount to flesh them out, make them human, then constantly knife them. In other words, Mallon makes you feel, which is not easy to do when there’s only words on a page. It’s not a display of torture but a devastating act of heart and skill. Nearly every page is astounding, intense, and ferocious; it’s got a whole lot of bark and even more bite.
The global tour continues. After racing through Mexico, Forza Horizon 6 is now headed to Japan, a “highly requested destination” as the Horizon Festival gets ready for a new adventure. Announced at the Xbox Tokyo Game Show back in September, Forza Horizon 6 will drop players into a reimagined Tokyo that promises to bring together Japan’s natural scenery with its dense, metropolitan vibrancy. Besides the new location, Playground Games is also putting a great deal of focus on showcasing what Japan has to offer, “whether it be how neighborhoods sound, even what a sign color communicates about a shop.” So if you want the latest on everything revealed so far, from the release date to trailers, gameplay details, and everything teased so far, here’s what we know right now about Forza Horizon 6.
Forza Horizon 6: Release Date
While there isn’t an official release date yet, Playground Games has confirmed that Forza Horizon 6 will be out sometime “early next year,” which (sort of) puts the game’s launch in first-half-of-2026 territory. As for platforms, it will land on Xbox Series X and S, as well as PC via the Microsoft Store and Steam. The upcoming racing game will also be available with Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass at launch, with a PlayStation 5 version planned for “post-launch.”
Forza Horizon 6: Setting
Like the previous entries in the franchise, Forza Horizon 6 is shifting the Horizon Festival to a new location, which the developers claim is the series’ most “highly requested destination.” Per the official developer blog, “In Forza Horizon 6, you will get to discover a scenic and breathtaking Japan, where you will build up your racing status to become a Legend at the Horizon Festival.” The open-world map will be built around a reimagined Tokyo as the main metropolis, surrounded by a wide mix of Japan’s natural and urban landscapes. And Playground Games said that they spent a lot of time making sure this version of Japan feels authentic rather than just visually appealing.
In a September Xbox Wire blog, the developers revealed that they have been working closely with cultural consultants and carrying out research trips across the country to capture the subtle details, such as the ambience of a local train station, the way a street sounds at dusk, the general look of everyday storefronts, and the lived-in energy that connects old and new Japan on every block. The team wants Forza Horizon 6’s world to feel vibrant, complex, and instantly recognisable, while still offering players the series’ trademark open-world playground.
To that end, the devs brought in cultural consultant Kyoko Yamashita, a lifelong car enthusiast, to help shape the team’s approach from early development. “Japan is widely loved, but it can also be widely misread when you only see it from afar,” explained Yamashita. “The team wanted to present more than a postcard or a backdrop; they wanted a lived-in world. Having a cultural consultant early helps you make a thousand small, respectful decisions: how neighborhoods sound, even what a sign color communicates about a shop. Those small choices add up to credibility and help avoid stereotypes, while also making it a truly immersive experience for players.”
Image Credit: Xbox
What Else Can We Expect From Forza Horizon 6?
Apart from Japan serving as the main backdrop for all the action, Forza Horizon 6 will also feature an exciting roster of cars (duh) influenced by Japanese culture. While the developers have yet to reveal the full list of cars we’ll get to drive, they did mention that choosing Japan as the setting opens the door for a lineup inspired by the country’s deep automotive history and culture. Playground Games’ Art Director Don Arceta teased that the upcoming game will follow in the footsteps of Forza Horizon 5 by presenting an eclectic array of cars players already know and love, while also bringing in Japan’s unique car culture for players to learn more about.
“In Japanese car culture, the depth and diversity is astonishing,” said Yamashita. “Kei cars and vans with cult followings, precision motorsport, drifting’s roots, and their passion for customization really stands out. It’s welcoming to different levels of enthusiasm and knowledge, which is exactly the kind of layered world I want players to feel.”
Similar to past entries, Forza Horizon 6’s open world will change as you play, with true-to-life seasons that fundamentally alter the setting around you. As you might know, Japan features some of the most well-known, beautiful seasonal changes in the world, from sweltering summers and snowy winters to, of course, the iconic sakura season, when cherry blossoms bloom across the country.
More importantly, seasonal changes in Forza Horizon 6 won’t just be about how the game looks, but also how it feels. “The team has also been able to build a system where seasonal changes truly inform the world – how spring, summer, autumn, and winter subtly shift tone, activity, and sound,” Yamashita stated in the Xbox Wire blog. “The team is also really proud of the attention to everyday details: ambient audio like station chimes or summer wind bells that instantly place you without a caption. Those are quiet choices, but they carry a lot of truth.”
We haven’t seen any raw gameplay footage yet, but the devs did share a few interesting details during an interview with GamesRadar+. For starters, Forza Horizon 6 promises the series’ biggest map to date with its version of Japan. Art Director Don Arceta described the country as “full of contrasts,” adding that the team wants to create “new driving experiences that capture the location,” mentioning everything from busy city streets to mountain roads and vast open plains.
“We never set out to make a location one-to-one,” Arceta told GamesRadar+. “It’s always capturing the spirit of the location, and trying to do that in an authentic way and obviously a respectful way. We use a lot of real life data as much as we can to build our world; so a lot of satellite data for the terrain, we take a lot of 3D scans of objects actually on location, a lot of reference photography. We capture skies. So, you know, there’s a lot there that we take”.
The map is said to be both big and dense, with surprises around every corner, meaning that there’ll be plenty of events, activities, and races to take part in. Tokyo will be one of the primary locations, and Arceta characterizing it as “complex and layered,” claiming it is the most ambitious city Playground has built for the series. He further pointed out that the game’s elevated roadways were developed using technology from the Forza Horizon 5 Hot Wheels expansion, adding that it will offer “something new and fresh.”
“Japan’s a breathtaking location, but I think they’ll be surprised just how much more of the culture we’ve tried to integrate into Horizon 6 outside of just the location,” Arceta added. “So obviously there’s car culture, but there’s different festivals and other cultural aspects that we actually wanted to inject a lot more into this game. I think we kind of dipped our toe in that a bit with Horizon 5. But working closely with Kyoko, I think people will be surprised; they’ll probably learn a bit more about this location than they might expect.”
Is there a trailer for Forza Horizon 6
Yes, there’s a trailer for Forza Horizon 6, which was shown off back in September during Tokyo Game Show 2025 alongside the first gameplay details. The just over a minute teaser doesn’t reveal anything substantial about the cars or gameplay, but it does show a series of license plates of all the featured locations from past games. We get to see license plates for places like Colorado, which was the setting of the original Forza Horizon, all the way through to Mexico from Forza Horizon 5. The trailer then ends with a wide shot over Mount Fuji before confirming Japan as the new setting for Forza Horizon 6.
And that’s about everything we currently know about Forza Horizon 6. For more gaming news and guides, make sure to check out our gaming section!
The world just lost the only woman who successfully pulled off Crayola-pencil-yellow hair. We found out last Wednesday via her page’s latest Instagram post “The Hogg Family is deeply saddened to announce the passing of our beloved Pamela. We are grateful in the knowledge that her final hours were peaceful and surrounded by the loving care of cherished friends and family… A glorious life lived and loved”, and it sure was. Pam may be gone, but the spirit and legacy she left behind has a special place in the fashion world’s heart, and will hopefully stay alive there.
Born in the late ‘50s in Scotland’s Paisley, Pam took her artistic vision to Glasgow School of Art where she studied Fine Art and Printed Textiles and started her medal collection, one to be jealous of, which she later completed with a Master of Arts at London’s Royal College of Art. Not exactly the classic industry insider. Pam was mostly self-taught in terms of fashion, she learned by doing, a reminder that if you’re obsessed with what you do, you’ll do just great, with magazines writing about you and all.
Punk, Latex, Clubs & Legendary Work
Forget ready-to-wear, honestly, the term might have scared her. Pam’s work was as if avant-garde fusion fashion and art performance had a neon-colored baby. Her collections were daring, unconventional, pulling from London’s underground culture, nightlife, punk, new wave, even sci-fi futurism if you will. Her silhouettes were tight, body-conscious, sometimes layered to the max. She made latex, leather, metallics and palettes so vibrant your eyes hurt, her weapon of choice. We’re talking no mass production, just pure custom, DIY-dripping genius. Her looks became Fashion Week events of their own, wrapping themselves around Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Kylie Minogue, Debbie Harry, Kate Moss, and pretty much every woman who understood that fashion is supposed to feel a little dangerous at times.
Fashion’s Wild Child Influence
Pam Hogg didn’t just influence fashion, she bullied it into being braver. Her work proved that creativity isn’t meant to be polite or commercially digestible, it’s supposed to slap you in the face a little. She gave underground DIY talent a seat at the high-fashion table, and unlocked a whole generation of designers who wanted to make fashion, art and statement into one. If today’s runways feel louder, weirder, and a little unhinged? Pam lit the fuse.
Her clothes may stop coming, but her impact is still here, in many runways, every club-kid’s look, every designer who chooses shock value over silence. She’s part of fashion’s DNA, and luckily, that’s a never-ending contribution.
Viewers decide fast. The first seconds either pull them in or push them away. That choice depends on clear intent, strong visuals, and sound that supports the message.
Teams in the Bay Area produce at a fast clip, and expectations run high. Many brands work with Corporate Video Production Services, including companies like Luma Creative in San Francisco, to align story, crew, and schedule. Whether you hire a partner or build in house, the same rules apply.
Write the promise of the video as a single sentence, then write it again in simpler words. Read those lines aloud until they sound natural. If they feel vague, the video will feel vague.
Choose one viewer to design for, then write a short profile on a single page. Note their job, context, and pain point. Keep it real, not idealized. When hard choices emerge later, use this page to decide.
List the action you want from the viewer after they watch. Make it small and concrete, such as booking a demo or sharing the clip internally. This target keeps scenes tight and avoids drift.
Build A Story That Fits Your Brand Voice
Pick a simple story spine, not a complicated plot. A clean arc works well, such as problem, approach, and result. Use real details from customer life, not corporate slogans.
Match tone to brand voice, then lock your vocabulary. If your brand prefers plain speech, keep it that way. If your brand uses dry humor, place it lightly and never at the customer’s expense.
Create three proof points that can appear on screen or through dialogue. These can be data moments, short quotes, or onscreen graphics. Each should connect to that one sentence promise you wrote.
Plan Visuals, Sound, And Pace Together
Treat picture and audio like partners, not separate tracks. Choose a visual system early, such as close faces, hands at work, or wide team shots. Use it to guide locations, lenses, and lighting.
Design sound before the shoot, not during the edit. Decide where music carries mood and where silence lets a point land. Record room tone at every location to smooth cuts later.
Set a pace rule for the edit before shooting. For example, hold talking shots under six seconds unless the emotion benefits from a longer take. This simple constraint prevents a sluggish cut.
Write An Honest Script And A Practical Board
Scripts for brand videos should read like people speak. Short lines beat long lines, and concrete nouns beat jargon. Invite one subject matter expert to review for accuracy, not style.
Translate script beats into a board that shows framing, subject action, and text on screen. A rough board is fine, but it must be complete. Your crew will move faster when shots are clear.
Keep a timing estimate beside each beat. Add a column for cutaways to cover jump cuts and tighten rhythm. This sheet will save your edit when a great interview runs long.
Prepare Interview And On-Set Workflows
Interviews benefit from a pre call that sets expectations and calms nerves. Share the goal, the shape of the story, and the time window. Ask for short, active answers with concrete examples.
On set, protect sound quality first, then light and frame. A quiet room or a solid lav mic choice prevents endless repair work later. Good sound carries authority, even in short web clips.
Organize assets on the day. Log the best takes. Photograph scene setups and lights. Clear notes prevent missed shots, speed the assembly, and help reshoots match without guesswork.
Edit For Clarity, Not Just Style
Open with the strongest proof that supports the promise. If a voice line hits hard, lead with it over music and title. Cut the first wide shot if it stalls momentum.
Use text on screen to anchor terms and numbers. Keep lines short and legible, and place them where eyes already travel. Avoid visual clutter that competes with faces or hands.
Check comprehension with a cold viewer who matches your profile. Ask what the video promised, what it proved, and what they remember. Their answers should align with your one sentence promise.
Keep your first cut under your target length by fifteen percent.
Remove any shot that repeats information already clear.
Replace general claims with a concrete example.
Leave room for platform trims and captions.
Design For Platforms, Access, And Measurement
Plan for captions from the start, then bake the need into framing. Captions cover muted playback and improve accessibility. They also help viewers keep pace with technical terms.
Export platform-ready aspect ratios from the same master timeline. Square, vertical, and widescreen cuts should share the same spine. This reduces version chaos and protects message integrity.
Choose two or three metrics before release and track them by platform. Play rate, watch time, and completion rate reveal real behavior. Compare against the same audience and the same style of video to avoid mixed signals.
Research on attention and media fatigue supports short, focused structures and clear goals. See the National Institutes of Health overview on attention and cognitive load for useful context, which can guide length and pacing choices for different audiences.
When To Bring In A Production Partner
You can handle simple shoots with a small team and rented gear. Bring in a partner when logistics, multiple locations, or live streaming enter the plan. External crews reduce risk and keep your team focused on message and approvals.
In the Bay Area, many companies partner with production teams that know local permits, crews, and sound stages. That knowledge saves time and protects budget. A seasoned producer will flag risks early and propose clear tradeoffs.
When you evaluate partners, look for past work in your industry, not only beautiful frames. Ask how they handle pre production, on set workflow, and delivery formats. Strong answers will reference scheduling, coverage, and clear reporting rather than vague claims.
Public sector media guides also offer practical checklists for production planning and accessibility. The U.S. General Services Administration publishes helpful guidance on video accessibility and captioning that brands can adapt for public releases. This resource supports consistent practices across teams and vendors.
Bring The Message To Life On Release Day
Treat release as part of production, not an afterthought. Prepare thumbnails, captions, and copy that use the same vocabulary as the video. Align the first three seconds of the cut with the still image and headline.
Give your sales or field teams a short usage note that explains where the video fits. Tell them when to share, what problem it solves, and which persona responds. Internal clarity boosts the odds that the right people see the work.
Archive source files with readable names and store rights paperwork beside them. Next year’s update will move faster, and legal reviews will be smoother. A tidy archive protects your brand and your schedule.
A short, disciplined process builds videos that people watch and remember. Start with one sentence, one viewer, and one action. Plan visuals and sound together, then cut for clarity and truth.
Ahead of the release of her fourth studio album, Unclouded, this Friday, Melody’s Echo Chamber has unveiled a heavenly new track called ‘The House That Doesn’t Exist’. It follows previous singles ‘In The Stars’, ‘Eyes Closed, and ‘Daisy’. Check out Diane Sagnier‘s video for it below.
“’The House That Doesn’t Exist’ turns the impossible perspective of a joyful human life in today’s world into reality, evoking a new sense of faith,” Melody Prochet said in a press release.
Cootie Catcher have announced a new album, Something We All Got. The follow-up to this year’s Shy at First is due February 27 via Carpark Records. Today’s announcement comes with the release of the propulsive, stirring new single ‘Straight Drop’. Check it out below.
“This one came from frustration of being vulnerable in the ‘wrong’ places,” singer-bassist Anita Fowl explained in a statement. “I can fully have a cry in front of strangers while taking the bus but then clam up when I’m in front of people I’m close with. That generally parallels my experience performing live, where I’m so unsure in person but can get so much out on stage.”
Something We All Got Cover Artwork:
Something We All Got Tracklist:
1. Loiter For The Love of It
2. Lyfestyle
3. Straight Drop
4. From Here to Halifax
5. No Biggie
6. Rhymes With Rest
7. Quarter Note Rock
8. Take Me For Granted
9. Wrong Choice
10. Gingham Dress
11. Puzzle Pop
12. Stick Figure
13. Going Places
14. Pirouette
On their sophomore LP, Gaman, 
Featuring nearly the same backing band as last year’s Kabutomushi EP, 
Different Talking is the first album 
There might be a self-reflective throughline across 
While 
For their mesmerizing second album, Magic of the Sale, 
When it comes to love, 
Parader is torn between 
From their first rehearsal together, it took less than a year for 
“I got caught in the teeth of the thoughts that keep me awake,” Stefan Babcock sings on ‘Paranoid’, a blistering highlight off 
Jenn Wasner’s radiant new album under the 
After releasing their sun-kissed, soulful debut Evil Joy in 2021, 
“I’m undressed, paperless, filter gone,” 
Written after she relocated from Los Angeles to New York, 
Sometimes, even beautiful words aren’t right for a piece of music that can transport you on its own, a skill Meg Duffy cultivates by going long periods of time making only 
After finishing his tour in support of 2023’s 
Produced by No Age’s Randy Randall, the debut album from the Chicago trio is buoyant, destabilizing, and incandescent, splicing together bursts of power-pop, dance-punk, dub, and concentrated noise with the playful, organic immediacy of a group constantly tuning into each other as much as their influences. 
The music MIKE makes instantly feels like an intimate dialogue, and Showbiz! is no exception. Between his richly lackadaisical delivery and hypnagogic use of samples, the looseness and fluidity of the New York rapper-producer’s approach keep the listener engaged but never more than arm’s length away. Yet what remains beyond grasp for MIKE, always at an odd distance, is the perfect sense of home, something he keeps searching for across the LP – though “home” is where he recorded all of it, in phases after stretches of touring. Similarly, he muses on the idea of breakout success more than simply lounging on it. “The prize isn’t much, but the price is abundant,” he raps on ‘Artist of the Century’, an apt summation of the whole project.
Emily Sprague has no trouble baring her soul out in her lyrics. Intimacy, like tenderness, has and never will be a difficult thing for the 
On their first album in 23 years, Pulp are still caught up with the inexplicable nature of beauty and love. But for perhaps the first time in the group’s history, Jarvis Cocker seems less fazed by those things, homing in on the feeling and spelling out the ineffable, sometimes literally, as on the early single ‘Got to Have Love’. More is the product of waiting, not taking, a long time to make something – of your fears, of missed opportunities, of time itself. “The universe shrugged, then moved on.” And then it hits you. In the wake of longtime Pulp member Steve Mackey’s death in 2023, as well as the passing of Cocker’s mother early last year, the follow-up to 2001’s Scott Walker-produced We Love Life feels effortful yet elegant in its insistence on expressing love, not just the kind that endures, but the ones that disintegrate or never even really existed. 
It’s one thing to write music from the stomach versus the heart, as was Will Wiesenfeld’s intention for Gut, his first 
45 Pounds is as trashy as it is taut, as harsh as it is relentlessly hooky. It’s a combination that brings to mind contemporary purveyors of controlled chaos such as Gilla Band and Model/Actriz, though what’s remarkable about the New York-based experimental outfit’s corrosive, improvisational blend of punk, hardcore, and electronic music is how fully realized – and funky – it sounds on their debut full-length. Zack Borzone’s vocal chops manage to stand out amidst the discombobulating interplay between Jack Tobias’ radiant synths and Sam Pickard’s frenzied percussion, which peaks on the penultimate track ‘Blackout’. It sprints forward while keeping you on your toes.
Don’t let the title – itself a nod to a John Cheever short story – fool you: the deeper you listen to For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), the harder it is to pigeonhole it. It’s less for any kind of female archetype than it is about a certain brand of foolish masculinity it frames as both timeless and contemporary. It’s about Michelle Zauner, too, a singer-songwriter and author who, following the pop-inflected glee and success of 
While he continues to build an impressive resume as an engineer, Asheville musician 
There was one thing 
DÍA is no less self-reflective than 
Trash Mountain is named after a pink house sitting on a decommissioned landfill site at the back of Burlington, Vermont’s Old North End, which 
Plenty of popular music has taught us that fame can be isolating, but Brendan Yates has been singing about loneliness way before the breakout success of 2021’s Glow On. What’s changed with their new album Never Enough, which has received a more muted but still loving response, is the vantage point. “This is where I wanna be/ But I can’t feel a fuckin’ thing,” Yates declares on its track ‘Sunshower’. While seeing them live in the wake of Glow On provided a rare example of how jubilant and light-hearted moshing can be, the remarkable thing about seeing them at the 
Linear progression is generally a myth, yet one often projected onto artists, who must continually level up their sound without straying from their original vision. 
I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away is hardly a solitary affair. Along with William Tyler collaborator Scott Hirsch, Pedigo brought together a group of musicians that includes violinist Nathan Bieber, pianist Jens Kuross, pedal steel player Nicole Lawrence, and “phaser suggester” Forest Juziuk. But while the arrangements are richly spacious and uniformly warm, Pedigo ensures nothing overshadows the simple majesty of his fingerpicking, which hums to its own rhythm. Written on a 20,000-acre in Wyoming, Pedigo shades in the vacuum of memory like there’s just as much beauty in forgetting as remembering, in observing landscapes through a window and noticing them blur together in your mind. Without saying a single word, no album in 2025 could make you more at ease with the passage of time.
Over the past decade or so, 
Following 2021’s kaleidoscopic 
The follow-up to 2022’s 
In the first hours of 2023, 
Catchy and aggressive from the get-go, 
“I never lie in my songs,” 
The title of 
After more than a couple of influential records in the increasingly saturated shoegaze genre – 2021’s self-titled LP, 2022’s a blip, and 2023’s in/out – Total Wife did the opposite of fading into obscurity, signing to Philadelphia label Julia’s War and cementing their status with their latest, come back down. It’s a breathlessly inventive and unconventionally dreamy record whose tides are difficult to predict or even identify – mind-melting guitars that get blown out and repurposed as synths, vocals whispered right beside your ear then chopped to oblivion, and a fluid rhythmic backbone evoking, to quote their song ‘rest’, “the beat in between my restlessness.” Pitched between jittery alertness and the edge of sleep, come back down is also a riveting expression of the duo’s dynamic compositional and lyrical instincts, a force that grounds the record in its malleable, blurry transcendence. 
keiyaA was feeling numb as the hype around her last album, 2020’s Forever, Ya Girl, began to die down, when she came across a post by writer Mandy Harris Williams: “a downward spiral is a loaded spring.” He was citing the concept in physics that became the title of, and poetic fuel for, the Chicago-born singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist’s latest album, hooke’s law. Building on the avant-R&B vision of her debut, it’s a dazzling portrait of jadedness unlike any in the genre while remaining absolute playful, both in its lush experimentation and silly one-liners. It’s not claustrophobic, exactly, so much as club music from the bottom of an emotional well. “I toast to lighten up the pain,” she offers on the closing track, “Until we meet again/ Start again.”
Subtlety is a virtue in the singer-songwriter world. In the face of a dying earth, however, and energized by collaborating for the first time in a writing capacity with her live band, the Attachment Theory – Devra Hoff on bass and vocals, Jorge Balbi on drums and machines, and TEEN’s Teeny Lieberson on synth, piano, guitar and vocals – 
Building on 2023’s Live at Bush Hall, Forever Howlong leverages 
More than continuously toeing the line between styles, between coherence and abstraction, 
Diving into Weatherday’s latest outing, Hornet Disaster – which stretches over an hour and 16 minutes – is a daunting task, but the Swedish experimentalist sounds more exacting, determined, and addictive than ever. Six years after Sputnik’s debut LP under the moniker, Come In, and just a few after an 
You don’t always know what 
Sparks fly all over Sounds like…, Florry’s second album with Dear Life Records. It’s impossible to deny on the record’s euphorically charged, lyrically intriguing opener, ‘First it was a movie, then it was a book’, but there’s plenty of magic to be found as the Vermont-based septet loosens up on the rest of the record. Like pretty much every album coming out of Asheville’s Drop of Sun Studios, this one, co-produced with Colin Miller, sounds lived-in and magnetic. There is a rawness, at times even an explicit emptiness, in bandleader Francie Medosch’s lyrics, but it’s hardly something to stop the band dead in its tracks. “I was hoping to use this song to talk about/ Something that had been going on but I could not get it out,” she sings on ‘Dip Myself in Like an Ice Cream Cone’. Something like it, still, spills out.
The Antlers
The third and titular rule of Don’t Tap the Glass is the most ambiguous, which is somewhat reflective of the overall balance the record strikes: it’s a straightforward rap-party project whose kineticism is undeniable, but, arriving less than a year after the densely packed 
With a title like Bugland, it feels lazy to call No Joy’s new album playful. It’s really the way Jasamine White-Gluz’s work registers as a playground that’s so thrilling: a place that triggers fuzzy memories, a fantastical portal, a wild abstraction with no equivalent in the real world. Beyond their shared musical interests and boundless genre-hopping – having the most fun in the islands of nu metal, shoegaze, and pop music – it’s where her approach intersects with Fire-Toolz’s Angel Marcloid, who co-produced the Motherhood follow-up not just with wide-eyed maximalism but true enthusiasm. It’s a wonder to hear them play and burst into a swirl of emotions mostly antithetical to the project’s name, to linger and rush out of them – maybe cutting the word in half does it more justice – fully.
Way before it was meticulously sequenced, Sinister Grift – Panda Bear’s first record to feature all his AnCo bandmates, with notable appearances from Cindy Lee, Spirit of the Beehive’s Rivka Ravede (Lennox’s partner), and his daughter Nadja – began with Lennox and his co-producer and lifelong friend Deakin (Josh Gibb) laying down material in his newly built studio in Lisbon. Like its ecstatic take on heartbreak, the record reconfigures country tropes, classic rock chords, and reggae rhythms without quite distorting or diluting them. It sounds at ease with its menace and disconcerted by its playfulness, and these are all words you can twist around every time you press play.
As far as 
It’s been five years since 
Deftones’ 10th album – and best in years – deftly balances their signature brutality and lushness. The follow-up to 2020’s relatively muted Ohms was produced by Nick Raskulinecz, who previously worked on 2010’s Diamond Eyes and 2012’s Koi No Yokan, and reminds us that no band can make cataclysmic music sound quite as sumptuous. On standout ‘milk of the madonna’, Chino Moreno invokes bloody rain, thunder, quaking winds, and most of all fire, sounding utterly consumed yet invigorated by the pummeling force of the instrumentation. “The display ignites your mind,” he sings. How could it not?
Ethel Cain
The title of 
During the pandemic, facing complications from myalgic encephalomyelitis and long COVID, Jasmine Cruickshank underwent heart surgery and was bed-bound for almost half a year. It was then that she decided to come out as trans, end her abusive marriage, and escape to Manchester, where she found – and was able to write through – her queer community. Backed by an all-trans band, 
First, 
For nearly an entire hour, Through the Wall barely changes up its groove. Remaining sultry and poised, Rochelle Jordan’s incadescent, scintillating new album anchors in a tasteful fusion of R&B and deep house that many attempted but none executed as faithfully as, the Los Angeles-based, British-Canadian singer-songwriter this year. Hooking you in with some of the most tempered – and temptatious – pop choruses of the year, Jordan doesn’t try to prove you won’t hear a better club record this year. She just swings into action, eager to take up space.
More than a surefire hit that’s capable of carrying a whole album, ‘9 2 5’ serves as a thesis statement for The Passionates Ones, whose title should stave off those without that kind of fire in their hearts. Slotted right in the middle of the record, it paints a typical portrait of an artist struggling to overcome systemic challenges to “manifest a vision,” while everything around it explores more personal, nuanced shades of it: “I dreamed this life, now I’m scared to live it,” Marcus Brown admits on ‘It’s Time’. Flitting between R&B, jazz, funk, and hip-hop, Brown’s eclecticism ensures the songs are radiant enough to prevent the fear from taking over – so they all shine just as bright.
On the first song of their 
Luminescent Creatures takes its name from the closing track of 
Essex Honey is probably too eclectic to sound like the music you grew up with, but it certainly feels like it. “Regressing back to times you know/ Playing songs you forgot you owned,” Dev Hynes sings on ‘Westerberg’, a key line on an album that digs through memory by interpolating songs from acts including the Replacements, Yo La Tengo, Elliott Smith, and Everything But the Girl’s Ben Watt. Just as evocative are the variably abstract passages of piano and cello, the first instruments Hynes ever played. Foggy, fatigued, yet clear-eyed, 
As the most pioneering band in modern shoegaze, TAGABOW could capitalize on a fantastical, watered-down version of a sound that’s only getting more popular, especially on their first LP for a bigger label in NYC’s ATO Records. They could shroud everything in glitchy layers of artifice and mutter poetic lyrics that mean nothing for the rest of their careers. Douglas Dulgarian’s way of avoiding that was making a record he’s deemed 
Sudan Archives’ lavish, ambitious world keeps expanding on THE BPM, but not at the expense of vulnerability – quite the opposite. Broadly speaking, the virtuoso’s third LP is as inventive as her 2022 breakout Natural Brown Prom Queen, but it also at times feels like a totally different album: wilder and more confounding its musical swings, more existential in its post-breakup candor. Sudan and her collaborators’ production is hypnotic and breathless with ideas without ever falling out of sync with the singer’s emotional overflow. “Sometimes I can get real low but I am high right now,” she sings on ‘Los Cinci’, prizing every point on the spectrum equally.
On 
“The foolish hope of great eternal beauty,” Anna von Hausswolff sings on ‘Facing Atlas’, reaching her highest register, “This shit breaks my heart.” As epically ambitious as the Swedish musician’s latest effort is, it’s no more high-minded than any other depiction of heartbreak, except in framing it as the equivalent of the sky splitting in two. The atmosphere is so imposing and dense it justfies the unyielding desparation in von Hausswolf’s voice, which hardly ever relaxes. Why would when it seems like the only thing that can power through the cacophony? In starting over, the singer finds better places to store her pure, frantic hope.
“I’m ready to feel like I don’t have the answers,” Lorde sings on Virgin’s opening track, ‘Hammer’. That doesn’t mean she’s not searching, but on the pop star’s first album in four years, she embraces that feeling. When she sings of the “peace in the madness over our heads,” it’s not reflective of the kind of healing journey that polarized listeners on 2021’s 
Though 
The world of 
“I’m a material bitch,” 
As if titling a song ‘Fame Is a Gun’ isn’t enough provocation, Addison Rae opens it with the lines: “Tell me who I am/ Do I provoke you with my tone of innocence?/ Don’t ask too many questions/ That is my one suggestion.” It’s tempting to intellectualize Addison in the context of the TikTok-dancer-turned-pop-singer’s personal narrative, or the references she wears on her sleeves – Lana, Britney, Madonna – or even the stream of singles that sold more and more people on the prospect of Addison. But tune into Addison and it becomes clear that innocence is a synonym for sincerity, which is the main reason its every move and mood – euphoric and wistful, woozy and downcast – feels seamless; though working with the writer-producer duo of Elvira Anderfjärd and Luka Kloser across the record adds to the cohesion. Rae luxuriates in it all even as she maintains an air of detachment. She cares, of course – just don’t think too hard about it.
Up until now, Smerz records have tended to pique my interest, even amaze, then soon slipped from my mind. But Big city life, the Norwegian duo’s fuzzily glorious new album, clicked in immediately – and demanded repeated listens. Evocative of their experiences in New York and their hometown of Oslo, the record – playful and, to borrow one of the track titles, feisty – resonates on a wider scale. Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt’s eccentricity remains intact, layering one ambiguous feeling after another, but never without pulsing forward. “I’m realizing lately/ That I won’t feel like this again,” is the closing sentiment on ‘A thousand years’. Might be half-remembered, even imagined, but never anything less than real.
Set My Heart on Fire Immediately
A selfie utilized as an album cover might be the first thing that strikes you about Blurr, making it no surprise the album carries the intimacy of a voice memo – and often sounds like it was recorded directly onto a cell phone. More than staring at yourself in the mirror or inside the screen of a tiny computer, however, Joanne Robertson’s latest release feels like shutting it off and catching your reflection in the blackness. Without any percussive accompaniment, it is full of rhythm, the coiling between her voice and guitar invoking the soul humming through the body: tender and tactile despite its fuzziness, temporal while stretching toward infinity. Oliver Coates’ string contributions, astonishing and meticulously placed, fill out the canvas as if in absolute certainty that endless place is not just reachable, but colours out the solitude.
Following last year’s Keeper of the Shepherd, 
If the words 
In an 
When Dijon sings that he’s on fire, you believe him. But it’s different from any other artist trying to sell the idea that lasting love has the power to obliterate all your insecurities. It’s chaotic, Dijon Duenas affirms, making swooning, infectious, dazzling R&B music that can sound on the verge of a breakdown even – or especially – at its most ecstatic. With help from Andrew Sarlo, Henry Kwapis, and Michael Gordon, the Los Angeles-based musician and producer has no issue fragmenting his most immediate hooks or rendering his voice unrecognizable when he’s most breathlessly trying to express himself. Whatever inspiration it owes to the past, Baby suggests you can no longer make beautiful, revelatory pop music without sounding at least a bit precarious or unwieldy.
Don’t let that cover artwork throw you off – take it as a warning sign. Though informed by sobriety, that newfound perspective edges the London-based electronic producer into an even more abrasive direction than her ketamine-fuelled 2021 debut, im hole. Because the reality of sobriety – its very soberness – can be even more horrifying, like a blinding light on the rear-view mirror where total fuckery is just a gasping breath or nightmare away. “I’ll never let myself forget/ They had me out on a witch-hunt/ When I found myself,” she intones on the opening track. aya’s production lets sounds – drawing from her childhood fascination with nu-metal and emo – ferment, spiral, and soften, only for her vocals to slice right through. It’s as wry as it is impossibly visceral and dazzling, like a manic dream you wouldn’t wake up from even if you could.
Hushed, gorgeous, and warmly elusive, 
After more than a dozen years of honing his songwriting with the band State Champion and a few experimenting with drum machines and weird synths, 
There’s no shame in describing the deepest of pleasures in simple language: “It feels nice,” 
On ‘Saturation Driver’, a highlight from 
That Bad Bunny would make an album that finds him reconnecting with the musical traditions of Puerto Rico, one that triumphantly doubles as a love letter to his motherland, is no surprise. But you barely have to scratch beneath the surface to acknowledge just how piercing, comprehensive, and ambitious of an effort Debí Tirar Más Fotos is – not only does it survey genres like salsa, plena, and música típica, but for those listening on YouTube, each of its accompanying 17 visualizers serves as a history lesson about Puerto Rican history. As musically rich as it is daring, the record also scans as one of Bad Bunny’s most personal, reeling from different kinds of loss, from cultural displacement to heartbreak. It’s way less of a detour than the global superstar reaching a new peak in predictably admirable fashion.
“Everything buffering, reality lag and jump/ Sometimes barely recognize the people I love,” 
Rosalía
If it sounds like the road is its own fateful character on Bleeds, it might have something to do with when and where it took shape. Entering the studio just a month after vocalist Karly Hartzman and guitarist 
“Not everything needs to even out.” The line stands out amidst the elusive tapestry of ‘Beautiful ending’, though the closer to caroline’s second album doubtlessly lives up to its titular promise. Not everything needs to resolve lyrically to make some sort of sense; not everything needs to line up musically to leave a mark on you. caroline 2 is a delightfully uneven yet meticulously crafted record, one that’s enamoured not so much with the disparateness of its parts as it is in the delicate act of stitching them together. In it you can hear empty spaces and vast stretches of time, people existing in the same room yet setting themselves adrift, bridging distances big and small. I can’t imagine not submitting yourself to its spell.
In the 1965 documentary Ladies and Gentlemen… Mr. Leonard Cohen, which follows the singer-songwriter around the age of 30, a TV interviewer asks what Cohen means when he says he tries to wake up in a state of grace. He describes it as “that kind of balance with which you ride the chaos that you find around you,” adding, “It’s not a matter of resolving the chaos, because there’s something arrogant and warlike about putting the world in order.” I kept thinking about his use of the word warlike as I spun 
feeo frames her fragile, eerily intimate songs against the backdrop of infinity. Cosmic possibilities and absurd injustices shimmer at the edges of Goodness, making its vision feel as wide as it is singular; yet the more microscopic details and emotional nuances the London artist homes in on, the more her sonic poems scan as small epics, oozing through the connective tissue of a deeper world. At 39 minutes, Theodora Laird’s full-length debut is astonishingly rich; it swirls, brews, and burrows, rewarding you the further you stay along with it. Her voice is invariably beautiful yet at times almost vaporized by its surroundings, as if everything is always hanging by an incredibly fine thread. But her discerning eye and sense of presence remain infrangible. “I’m only a witness,” she sings, bearing like few artists dare to.
Political fiction is always a hard sell. Most of it is didactic, unsubtle, or woefully out of date, which is why I was pleasantly surprised with 
Sexy and enigmatic, Simone and Ethan are the stars of Edwards University’s creative writing program—incoming students pine after them, reading their books that are probably about each other. But one, a cheeky student named Robbie who narrates the novel, attempts to join in on the fun and potentially disrupt their picture-perfect marriage, becoming entwined with Simone. Emily Adrian’s sly metafiction sees a relationship strengthening, determined to last through stellar conversations and genuine chemistry. It’s filled with the desperation of anyone who’s ever had a crush on their English teacher. 
Horrific and disgusting, Michel Nieva’s story of a scorned, transgender humanoid mosquito who’s activated during a circlejerk at a boy’s camp might not be for everyone. But for all its graphic insanity, 
Kyle Seibel roots for the loser. “Fucked by life” might be a crude descriptor, but many of the characters in his debut collection 
Andrew Lipstein’s freewheeling novel—loosely autofictional, as always—sees Reuben and Cecilie, married journalists, abroad in Copenhagen with their toddler, reconnecting with Cecilie’s old friend group and imagining a life divorced from America and all its humiliations (Reuben was recently caught giving his wife head on a work Zoom call). But wherever you go, there you are, and as he awkwardly integrates himself within her friends, he finds himself thinking about masculinity, spurned by a bawdy reporter named Mikkel, whom Reuben decides to interview. Not for any journalistic reason, just request to how to be more relaxed in a male body, something that is up in the air these days. In its exploration of how to live morally and manly, Lipstein’s witty and provocative 
Journalistic powerhouse Jeff Weiss’ first book could have been about anything, but he chose Britney Spears. It’s apt—she’s how he began his career, sneaking into the shoot for “…Baby One More Time,” Spears’ debut single; he never seems to shake her charm. Joining the hoards of tabloid reporters, 
I was hooked on whatever’s happening within Jessica Gross’ mind after devouring 
Deliciously plotted and shiveringly eerie, Harris Lahti throws you into the dusty, dark atmosphere of Hudson Valley house renovation. The father and son duo of Vic and Junior tackle dwellings that spook them; they quit and come back, even if it kills them. 
Kaleidoscopic and wildly inventive, E.Y. Zhao’s debut 
