2025

Music from my year

Hi, I’m sorry it’s been so long.¹ Here’s some of the music I’ve loved this year:

William William Rodgers - Pond Life (2024) (LP)

Beautiful, challenging, rich album. Kind of feels like picking up a slim volume of poetry at the local used bookstore and finding it has the truth about life written on every page. And you don’t even like poetry. But this isn’t poetry set to music. The scansion is right for pop music, the aesthetic recalls Prefab Sprout, by way of, I don’t know, Edward Elgar. I love the concept: “Pond Life”—seems to me to be about one’s inner life, sometimes turbulent, sometimes serene. And sometimes—case in point, “Dig It”—it flat out rocks. Some of the freshest music I’ve heard this year. It didn’t come out this year? Shit. I think it ought to be heard, and talked about.

Hannah Cohen - Earthstar Mountain (2025) (LP)

I loved getting lost in all the casually virtuosic arranging on this album. It is probably my most played-drums-to album of this year. This song sticks out to me. Flipping the opening line “baby, you’re lying” to “lying baby” after including yourself in the accusation is just fantastic. It’s the emotional reversal I’m always looking for in songs.

Search Results - Information Blip (2023) (LP)

Another one from, uh, 2 years ago, that I only found this year. (There’s a new LP, but I haven’t caught up yet). Everyone is talking about a certain American band with a bird theme. They should be talking about Search Results (whose bio reads simply: “Ireland”). This is the genuinely imaginative, melodically brilliant music you have been looking for. Do not be put off by the lo-fi recording, that just means this record didn’t cost a fortune to make, and that should make you respect it all the more for how vividly it conjures up a world of its own. A friend standing in the rain; spending the night in a bus station; following a surreal path through the woods to climb “the rocky mountains” above which people are drowning in the rushing sea. It’s playful and powerfully evocative, and confident of its lyrical and musical language. And there are some right-size freakout sections. Come on, check it out.

Frederick Delius - “On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring” (Single) (1912)

Discovering Delius got me through the long months before spring. I was going through a phase where I felt very burned out on modern indie music and found myself listening mostly to this, and everything else on the London Symphony Orchestra record. I think I briefly encountered Delius in college long enough to go, huh, I actually like that, and then forgot because it was in the context of listening to 20 other composers from the same time period. If I’d heard this piece first, I might have remembered it better. I put this on for my friends one evening and everyone was immediately like woah, what the hell, this is amazing. Like I’ve written before, I think the secret sauce if you will is in the voice leading; writing melodies that feel like vocal melodies and harmonies, because in fact Delius was trying to imitate spirituals he heard while forced to manage his family’s orange plantation in Florida.

Phoebe Rings - Aseurai (2025) (LP)

Probably my most listened to album this year.² For me it’s just an avalanche of perfect musical decisions; it’s a little bit bossa nova, a little bit Stereolab, a fair amount disco. It’s all familiar, but always creative and imaginative, and surprising. I was lucky enough to get to see this band this year and their performance encompassed all of these things: I particularly liked when everything cut out for a verse except the drums and vocals and the three other members of the band playing shakers, before seamlessly transitioning back to full instrumentation. You get the sense that a massive amount of care was put into this music, but it doesn’t feel obsessive. There’s a loose feel of ease and effortlessness, and experienced musicians having the good sense not to over-elaborate on strong, simple ideas.

Julian Cubillos - Julian Cubillos (LP) (2025)

Incredible groove, genius guitar magic, and some of the sharpest lyrics I heard this year. The vocals are often a little buried, which makes it all the more shocking when you finally work out what one of the lines is and go, oh shit, exactly. Examples: “you keep on telling me to believe / you don’t even believe yourself”; “Don’t you know you can’t un-wrong that right?”; “The way a broken mirror / only cuts you”. Just really, really good. And it’s all wrapped up in irresistible music. I excitedly described it in conversation as “Elliott Smith meets Prince” and I still wouldn’t walk that back. It’s the perfect music for me—that is, someone who thinks Elliott is great but wishes he would get a little funkier. I think excitingly the slightly bouncy, dancy feeling here is not just for the hell of it, it actually contributes to the meaning of the music, of recognizing the things about yourself that you’re not terribly proud of, and not just accepting them but styling them out.

Red Stamp - “Dancing With My Baby” (Single) (2025)

The literal coolest shit ever. I just want to hear more. The counterpoint! And in two languages? And then the hooks. It’s amazing and feels like the future. Top of the charts material, if I were in charge of the charts.

Cass McCombs - Interior Live Oak (LP) (2025)

Cass McCombs finally gets serious. I mean, I’m just kidding. But do you know what I mean? One thing I love and respect about Cass McCombs is his willingness to lean into repetition past the point of good taste, then past the point of humor, then past the point of annoyance to where it becomes kind of meaningful again in a new way. A lot of his songs do this. But I totally understand why that would put you off some of his music: if you’re not willing to go there, it’s not going to work for you. But this new record has more than a few songs that seem pared down to their essential components. The lyrics are, as they often are with songwriters further into their careers, more direct and urgent. This song has basically nothing going on, and yet it feels good. I feel like the song’s heart is here: “Tell me, tell me truly / For once truly tell.” It’s a reprisal of a theme I’ve noticed, as a fan, across a lot of Cass’ recent records: no more illusions, I want the truth. But the truth is heavy, and to carry it takes both the strength articulated in the lyrics—“every muscle [and] every cell”—and the gentleness expressed in the music, which somehow even manages to sneak in a gorgeous mandolin line without me noticing.

Liam Kazar - Pilot Light (2025) (LP)

I like “we could play monopoly / if you’ve got a year to burn”: on the one hand there’s the obvious joke, monopoly takes forever, ha ha. But also, isn’t that what we’re doing with our lives—trying to make our budgets balance and stay above water? And then a year goes by while you were worrying. Am I right to say that some of the most powerful music paradoxically feels like a shrug? This album feels like a shrug in the best way, as in, come in, take a load off, sit by the fire, let’s make dinner. This is kind of what it’s all about. After quite a few listens I was wondering what feels so comforting to me about this stuff, and I think it’s that this song, and a couple others on the record, feel like White Album cuts, which is on some level maybe the highest praise I can give anything.

Hospitality - Hospitality, and Trouble (LPs) (2012 and 2014, respectively)

This was the year that I discovered Hospitality. Where had this band been all my life? Finding this band sort of reconnected me with some of the music I’d loved from a little over a decade ago, when this stuff was coming out. Unfortunately for my blog writing it’s one of those situation where there’s an ineffable quality to the music that I can’t suss out with language, and you’re just going to have to listen and see (if you don’t know them already). Maybe it’s the New England in me; I'm reminded of course of Vampire Weekend’s best, and also just the optimistic feeling of the time. Why doesn’t music feel expansive like this anymore? I don’t think it has to do with reverb. I think we’ve just scaled back our horizons. I wish there was more, though I also deeply respect these guys for moving on with their lives before the music industry completely went off the rails.

Adeline Hotel - Watch The Sunflowers (LP) (2025)

This has been my “biking by the ocean” soundtrack for much of the summer and fall. I slowly began to realize, as these singles were coming out, that I don’t know of anyone else doing this kind of melodic, British folk-inflected songwriting this well at the moment. It creeps up on you, maybe with those absolutely perfect string arrangements partway through this song, “Dreaming.” There’s a modernity to it—some warbly, Broadcast-ish synths, some icy sleekness—that pushes things forward in a way I haven’t heard before. I like how the wandering dreaminess of the past several AH records is gently nudged into slightly more structural pop forms here, and yet paradoxically those more typical forms are subverted again by being willing to fully drop out the rhythm track for a few bars, or turn the verse accompaniment into an ambient record. It feels genuinely experimental, as in taking risks, not just “experimental” as a genre tag—and the results are exciting.

Los Lobos - The Ride (LP) (2004)

I bought this CD at the library book sale, and have found myself listening to it quite a lot at work. The big realization was that this album, this band, must have been a major touchstone—if not basically the main influence—for Damien Jurado’s Maraqopa album trilogy. Listen to this song and see what I mean. (Or maybe you already know all about this and I’m just catching on.) The pocket is so strong in this band. What else is there to say. I also like the Elvis Costello track that comes out of nowhere.

Katy Pinke - Strange Behavior (LP) (2025)

Another CD I’ve had the chance to dig into since I bought it from Katy last month in Bellingham. I’ve spent a number of mornings at work being mesmerized by that very “Everything Means Nothing to Me” ascending line at the end of this one. And the meditative “Not What I Thought”—which I keep finding new meaning in. And the magical, meter-defying finale of the title track. There are a lot of magical, infinite-feeling ascents in these songs. Sometimes I think a magical ascent in music is all you need to experience powerful transformation. Or if not, it can at least show you the way, if you’ve forgotten: “I’m trying to remember / I’m trying to remember / I’m trying…”

Prefab Sprout - Earth, The Story So Far (Single) (2009)

This is my new old Sprout song that I’m into at the moment. Are those jingle bells? It feels like a Christmas song somehow. I don’t know what that insane midi bassline is doing but I love it. I also love that this is basically just a demo that got souped up for release, tacky digital instruments and all. I can’t help it, I just love the inauthenticity, it feels real to me. When nothing is genuine, the sky’s the limit.

Ava Luna - Ava Luna (2025) (LP)

Ava Luna are a band I found on the internet way back when and have always felt like a mystery, and I like it that way. At the time I had a feeling that these mysterious Brooklynites in this mysterious band possessed all kinds of secret knowledge far beyond me. Now some years have passed and you know what? I still feel that way. Their music is still so strange and surprising and downright fun that I still can’t place it, and I don’t want to. If it were up to me, this is the music that would play in the nightclubs (I say, a big nerd, never having set foot in one). “Lasting Impression” starts off feeling like a lost hit from the era when offbeat indie stuff still had a chance to get on the radio. “Game Level” feels like something Bebel Gilberto would do, maybe in collaboration with Serge Gainsbourg. “Social Diving” begins a capella, then settles into a groove I’d be tempted to call old school hip hop if I knew anything about that. The lyrics seem opaque, but then they’ll catch you off guard: “I’m no physicist, but I see cold tile and a head that could use a pillow.” That’s right. There’s nothing scientific about all this; a “math money job” it is not. These are musicians making music at the top of their game, where “game” is a moving, impossible target better left alone. “Trust / I got this now.”

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Thanks for reading.

Does this post mean I will get back into the swing of weekly posting? I’m not sure. I have every intention of writing more blog posts, but I won’t promise anything just yet. I would sort of like the posts to get even looser, and I would also sort of like to get off Substack, but that currently feels like more work than it’s worth.

1. Foster, where have you been? The short version is, I intentionally took a break from the blog in May, then for the rest of the year I found myself unexpectedly on a long, strange health journey. I’m doing much better now and hope to be back to full posting power sometime soon.

2. I don’t like to brag, but Tidal informs me I am Phoebe Rings’ no. 3 fan. I don’t think I should have access to this information.