The nominees are! And yes, one of these things is not like the others!

Hi, I’m Hungry-Man-Sized Casey Kasem and welcome to another music listicle, but not a Top Ten because I didn’t buy that many!

As part of my annual series of chronically late year-in-review entries, I remain one of six people nationwide who still prefers compact discs to digital downloads. My hangups about vinyl would require a separate essay unto themselves, though I finally waded into some of that last year. My new-album splurges are rare because: (a) it’s increasingly tougher for new music to catch my ear as I grow older and more finicky; and (b) my favorite yesteryear acts died, stopped recording, or swiveled in directions away from me. That usually means missing out on what majorities loves, thus further dropping me down the bottomless wishing well into total irrelevance as chronicled on this very website, thirteen years and counting.

In 2025 I got six brand new studio albums, omitting any pre-2025 finds or gifts. It can be fun to walk past the cool-collectors’ vinyl bins to the way-back by the T-shirt rack and pick through what passes for in-person CD sections today, though I’m seeing diminishing returns as those get smaller and dustier, sometimes not even alphabetized. More often than not, More and more, I’m resorting to online disc-shopping because all of Indy’s coolest stores are on other sides of town faraway from us, and the stores we stumble across in our road trips aren’t stocking new stuff I like. Or maybe it’s all selling out before I come in? I wouldn’t know, but I feel like these artists would be much bigger today if that were the case.

Nevertheless, on with the countdown!

6. Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, KPop Demon Hunters. The movie was a blast, with its “what if Buffy, Willow and Faith were a girl group” alt-timeline adventure, and the tunes were catchy in context, but I haven’t bought a ticket for the full bandwagon membership. The first few tracks stick with me even unaccompanied by animation, but the rest is the sort of over-synthified single-gender-group club-backdrop that’s almost never my thing. The Academy Award-winning “Golden” is just now heavy-rotating in our local “oldies-and-today” radio stations, though I grooved more to the hard beats and harder swerves of “Takedown”, which youthfully confirms single-minded we-are-the-greatest boasts didn’t die out with old-school rap after all.

5. The Beths, Straight Line Was a Lie. The New Zealanders’ fourth album is my first sampling of them after Pitchfork touted its title track, a Ramones-brief merry-go-round of disenchantment with life’s Groundhog Day patterns. The sentiment extends elsewhere, most fervently in “No Joy”, which sparks with Linda Lindas energy, and “Metal”, where they Lyft into TMBG’s science-rock borough. But the majority idle at the calmer end of the power-pop spectrum, the kind of ethereal coffeehouse susurrus that sounds soothing enough if I happen to pause briefly on SiriusXM’s Alt Nation, then keep scanning.

4. Rise Against, Ricochet. A lot of bands that scored nationally during the 2000s alt-rock era barely got airplay here in Indy, leaving a lot for me to discover post-fame thanks to the magic of YouTube’s algorithmic suggestions. Lately that’s meant vapid AI-xeroxed muddle-machine musik (UGH WHY PLEASE STOP), but sometimes they let me latch onto singles I wish I’d caught at release. Rise Against’s anthemic “Savior” was among the “new” suggested listens, spurring me to go find where they stand today. They’ve aged out of punk and into the Gaslight Anthem’s grayer cousin, stubborn enough to fortify their dense guitar-walls but slowed to a less stressful pace as they urge us to shrug off complacency and/or regrets and/or all the wreckage piled around us wrought by whatever. Ambiguous forces are the foe, nothing explicitly partisan, though they, um, rise most stridently against floodwaters and burning coals in “Forty Days” and the wrecking balls and tidal waves of “I Want It All”, the nearest they come to gaining yards on the field rather than playing defense.

3. The Hives, The Hives Forever Forever the Hives. Among that stampede of classic-rock revivalist plural-noun bands from the early 2000s, only Jack White seems to remain a mainstream household name (though no longer big enough for our local big-box stores to rack his 2026 disc). Pelle Almqvist and company never really faded away, and come out swinging and snarling on their seventh disc with the SHUT UP, YOU ALL SUCK micro-manifesto of “Enough Is Enough” before focusing on more specific targets — one-percenter nepo-babies, intelligent design proponents, and anyone else in their path they think merits a good steamrolling. Almqvist — or the unreliable narrator he plays, if we kid ourselves — overdoses on self-aggrandizement at times: “Roll Out the Red Carpet” preens up and down, “Born a Rebel” is snottier than Tom Petty ever was about it, and “Path of Most Resistance” puffs its chest but fairly calls out the meek for “staying bullseye center in your comfort zone”. I couldn’t stop watching and rewatching the video for the aggro NSFW “Paint a Picture” because I’m a sucker for abrupt time changes and Roy Lichtenstein homages. Inexplicably they collapse under a deluge of Neon Trees nanobot gloss in the title track at the end, possibly the Worst-Ever Name for an Album with a Title Track. On the bright side, after all these years I think now I can finally tell the Hives apart from the Vines.

2. Bob Mould, Here We Go Crazy. Nobody I talk to IRL ever knows who Hüsker Dü were, so there’s no use ranting about old age as I realize their final studio album will be forty years old in 2027. Now in his mid-60s, Mould’s as hale as ever on his fifteenth solo album, an intentional return to his ’90s college-crowd-pleasing power-pop era. I had the pleasure of seeing him live with backing stalwarts Jason Narducy and Jon Wurster two months after the CD’s release and hearing its undeniably Sugar-y highlights in person — among them, the aptly named bludgeoning of “Neanderthal” that lumbers from naive youth toward wall-punching old age; the post-breakup pep-talk of “When Your Heart Is Broken”; and the substance-abusive spiraling of “Fur Mink Augurs”, another in his long line of creatively inscrutable titles. Who knew this was a precursor to an actual Sugar reunion that commenced the following October and is still in progress today. So far Crazy feels more Copper Blue than any of Sugar’s latest songs, but David Barbe and Malcolm Travis do have a bit of dust to shake off.

1. Sleigh Bells, Bunky Becky Birthday Boy. Viewers of the new Supergirl movie were treated to the infectious opener “This Summer”, which got my hopes up before things sped downward, but for once I could feel ahead of the curve: I’d already replayed it several times off the Brooklyn noise-pop duo’s sixth disc, a hyperkinetic 21st-century alchemical boost of Americanized Britpop that, I confess, shames my uncool self for missing out on their first five. I blame society for not alerting me to their raucous soundscapes — it’s like if Icona Pop underwent diva reduction therapy, or if Chvrches bought a new espresso machine, or if Gillen and McKelvie set fire to a barrel full of unsold Kula Shaker LPs in a London club and summoned a tiny American Phonogram coven into our dimension. If “This Summer” caught your ear and wouldn’t let go, and you didn’t hold the rest of the film against it, inject the title track or the spasmolytic “Wanna Start a Band?”, which waxes micro-nostalgic before burying the past with fun-house synths and riffs. Or better yet, go buy the album and catch them all.

…and that’s the musical year that was — no live albums, compilations or reissues this time around. Thanks for reading! Lord willing, see you next year if I keep adding new voices to my collection and not just retreating to the past!