Best Releases of 2025

I get bugged with releases I can't play straight through anymore, especially now when most things seem to be built around streaming services, social media, and artificial PR campaigns. But every so often, something new arrives with enough personality and punch that really makes me think again. These ten or so releases — LPs, EPs, 45s — were the ones that truly did it for me this year. It's the big sound of 2025.

Artwork by Paris Rodd

Ozzie Hair - Uninsured

Best known for slinging the axe in The Prize, The Judges, and The States, Ozzie Hair brought us back to our senses with his debut EP Uninsured. This six-track, stripped-to-the-bone deconstruction of rock 'n' roll arrived like a warning shot. Continuing the tradition of The Stooges, Simply Saucer, DMZ, Radio Birdman, and Bo Diddley, Uninsured encapsulates everything what rock 'n' roll is, was and always will be about.

Dumbells - Up Late With

For the uninitiated, Dumbells might seem like an oddity. With clear nods to pop rock institutions (Let's Active, Dump Truck, The dB's), the Sydney group made up of members from Shrapnel and Tee Vee Repairmann, undercut rock 'n' roll conventions with an unsettling edge of fragile melodies, very graphic and peeling guitars, rugged harmonies, and an absurdist wit. Up Late With is a strong first impression that feels refreshing in the fatigued world of "guitar pop."

Alley Girl - Peregrine Rambler

In a Hollywood scene buzzing with rising stars and home-recorded cassette visions, Alley Girl stands out like a flickering candle in a backstreet full of sodium streetlights. The project is the brainchild of Doris Stanić, a Netherlands-born, Bosnian-rooted artist who channels personal ghosts, outsider philosophy, and lo-fi grit into something raw, melodic, and unmistakably her own. Her debut album, Peregrine Rambler, plays like a bedroom broadcast from some future-past radio tower — tape hiss, diary confessions, and enticing melodies colliding in a haze of homemade glamour and psychic resolve that's reminiscent of On The Air, Little Girls, The Shirts, and The Shivvers. Stanić brings an ear of fractured '60s beat pop to her current Hollywood output with tales of resilience, romance, and reel-to-reel tape wizardry.

Lael Nael - Altogether Stranger

Lael Neale's Altogether Stranger is a 32-minute transmission from a beautifully dislocated world, an album that turns alienation into revelation. Written and recorded in the early-mornings of Los Angeles, these nine songs stretch from near-apocalyptic rock 'n' roll nursery rhymes to solitary Omnichord meditations, all threaded by Neale's gift for finding the uncanny inside the everyday. Distorted and strangely tender pop art for the soul. It's Neale's most adventurous, self-possessed work yet, and one of the year's most quietly mesmerizing records. Also be sure to check out the album outtake “Some Bright Morning.”

Danny Ayala - Only Fools Love Again

As a touring member of The Lemon Twigs, Danny Ayala clearly understands the architecture of pop rock 'n' roll to the highest degree. On his debut LP Only Fools Love Again, Ayala applies his own singular vision, creating songs that feel both familiar and fresh. Across the ten tracks, standouts like "Something With You" and "Smile for Me" shine with a glammy sense of theatricality, balancing bittersweet piano-driven melodies with maximum hooks-per-groove and playful sunshine pop. The Long Island sound is back and better than ever.

The Cowboys - Captain Easy's Downfall

Following their 2023 album Sultan of Squat, The Cowboys returned this year with something even bolder: Captain Easy's Downfall. This wide-eyed, wildly adventurous 19-track album pushes their scrappy pop rock 'n' roll ethos into far and new territory. With members scattered across cities and countries, the album was born from long-distance collaboration, obsessive layering, and a commitment to reinvention without abandoning their roots from straight riff-o-rama Nuggets-style garage-rock to offbeat, theatrical psychedelic pop anchored by singer Keith Harman's charismatic wit and charm. It's another thrilling chapter in a career defined by fearless creativity, proving once again The Cowboys still remain one of American rock 'n' roll's greatest institutions.

Brian D'Addario - Till the Morning

While The Lemon Twigs' Brian D'Addario's Till the Morning serves as a debut solo album, its spirit is deeply collaborative. Recorded across multiple studios, Till the Morning threads messages of spiritual longing, quiet isolation, and karmic reckoning into a sound that's been referred to as "country baroque" (think Gram Parsons, The Association, The Yellow Balloon). The two cuts "Song of Everyone" and "What You Are Is Beautiful," co-written with legendary poet and painter Stephen Kalinich (The Beach Boys), expand the album's sense of cosmic Americana while blending open-hearted pop rock lyricism with ornate, harmony-rich arrangements. Brian's younger brother and bandmate Michael D'Addario co-writes and sings lead vocals on "This Summer," a haunting and sun-drenched spiritual ode. The album’s production is warm and meticulous, wrapped in an analog glow that lifts even the album's heaviest themes, which is most clear on the opening title track. But overall, this LP feels like a magnified close-up of Brian's sensibilities — gentler, more contemplative, and steeped in emotional clarity.

Tchotchke - Playin’ Dumb

Tchotchke's Playin’ Dumb is a dazzling leap forward that rotates around '60s rock romanticism and girl-group melodrama sharpened into something unmistakably their own. Produced by The Lemon Twigs  in their Brooklyn studio dubbed "The Vegetable Attic," the album was recorded over the course of four seasons and pushes beyond the trio's self-titled album from three years ago. The opener "The Game" immediately signals an evolution — its marching boots, Moog lines, and bike-horn bursts turning the song's long-gestating arrangement into a miniature pop spectacle. Tracks like "Did You Hear?" and "Poor Girl" sharpen the album's themes of gossip, heightened femininity, and conversational drama, with their character-driven songs that channel The Shangri-Las, Dolly Mixture, and The Tammys. The title track stays deliberately "dumb" — three chords, simple lyrics, and a big, Spector-sized chorus that lands with disarming clarity, while "Now I Love You" remains the album's most luminous sigh, a minimal waltz that lays bare their instinct for insecurity-as-romance. By the end, Playin' Dumb feels less like an act and more like Tchotchke's clearest truth yet.

Tom Henry - Songs to Sing and Dance To

The phrase the "LA sound" has meant a lot of things over the past six decades. Some people associate it with all sorts of things, but to me it will always be the sound of The Beach Boys, Phil Spector, Jan & Dean, The Byrds, Love, and Kim Fowley. After a few decades of sedated trends, Los Angeles hasn't felt more alive and diversified than it does right now. And somehow, a red-headed boy named Tom Henry born in the suburbs of Chicago, knows this sound inside out. While he's only spent a short while living and playing in LA, he captures the city's analog warmth with an overdose of spirit on his debut LP Songs to Sing and Dance To. From the mind-bending opener "Close Your Eyes" to the sunset-soaked "The Mountains," Henry bends AM pop and pure rock 'n' roll impulses into something personal and present. But all too rarely, something comes along that hits a nerve. Scholarly pop-mania.

The Lemon Twigs - "I've Got A Broken Heart" b/w "Friday (I'm Gonna Love You"

The Lemon Twigs' latest 45 landed just a month before the year ended, but it's one of those rare singles that feels like an instant classic the moment the needle hits the groove. Both sides channel chiming guitars, Boyce & Hart-style hooks, and an analog glow into performances that are again engaging and meticulously crafted. "I've Got a Broken Heart," which was played live over the last year, hits with a kind of effortless melancholy and urgent pulse that the brothers have perfected across their last couple LPs. On the flip side, "Friday (I'm Gonna Love You)" bursts with the psychedelic pop exuberance of Curt Boettcher and Gary Usher with its sunlit melodies and stacked harmonies that deliver a technicolor exuberance that feels both timeless and immediate. In 2025, no one else is writing pop music with this level of intention, detail, and heart. Right now, there's The Lemon Twigs and then there's everyone else.