Every month, Uproxx cultural critic Steven Hyden makes an unranked list of his favorite music-related items released during this period — songs, albums, books, films, you name it.
1. Geese — Getting Killed
After listening to Getting Killed for the past few months, I have no doubt that it is the greatest album of 2025. But I am even more confident that is the most 2025 album of 2025, the record that, by far, best captures how scary and chaotic things seem right now, in this age of smart robots and dumb authoritarians and passionately litigated talk-show controversies and memory-holed sex-trafficking conspiracies. Getting Killed nailed that “tragicomic horror show” vibe from the moment the video for “Taxes” dropped, when Geese depicted themselves playing for an audience of unhinged freaks who rip each other apart as the music hits an exhilarating peak. That was back in July. At the start of fall, we are currently in full-on self-immolation mode. Threats, invective, limbs, bullets — they’re all choking the air like vultures. And now, finally, the appropriate soundtrack for the madness has arrived.
2. Wednesday — Bleeds
From a lyrical perspective, Bleeds is as chaotic as the music is (relatively) orderly. Whereas the narratives on Rat Saw God often seemed linear and coherent, nearly every lyric on Bleeds feels like a story onto itself. And Karly Hartzman stacks them together like she’s emptying several notebooks filled with observations from life on the road as well as the North Carolina countryside. Sometimes, this approach risks lapsing into unwitting self-parody. (The line from “Pick Up That Knife” about throwing up in the pit at a Death Grips show could have come from a Wednesday lyric generator.) As for her delivery, Hartzman’s voice remains Wednesday’s most “love it or hate it” element. Detractors will surely listen to the droning mini-epic “Carolina Murder Suicide” and blanch at her unsteady pitch and idiosyncratic phrasing. But for those of us who are fans, that voice remains a singular insurance policy against Wednesday ever becoming too poppy or mainstream. Even at its most palatable, Bleeds remains a defiant statement of artistic and regional specificity that could not come from any other band. And what a band, truly, Wednesday has become.
3. Liquid Mike — Hell Is An Airport
I fell in love with this band upon the release of their previous album, Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot. I root for them because they hail from Upper Michigan, and because they love Guided By Voices and songs about drinking and small-town life and how the former informs the latter. All admirable traits in my book. The best thing about their latest LP is that they didn’t mess with the formula. Hell Is An Airport is 27 minutes of non-stop hooks and guitar fuzz, by the best band to come out of nowhere in a while.
4. Brian Dunne — Clams Casino
A fascinating record for how “normal” it is, which in most contexts doesn’t sound like a compliment, but in this instance, I swear that it is. If this were 1995 instead of 2025, Dunne would be on a major label and touring with Counting Crows and Gin Blossoms. Clams Casino is made up of extremely well put-together heartland-ish rock songs that are perfect for radio formats that no longer exist. Most contemporary artists who work in this vein apply some form of air quotes to their music — they make it sound lo-fi or downright crappy, or the lyrics scan as somewhat ironic or subversive. But Dunne just does it with straight-up earnestness, which might be the most subversive approach of all, honestly.
5. Will Olsen — 5 4 1
This actually came out at the end of last year, but I didn’t hear it until last week. And if people are going to put Cameron Winter’s Heavy Metal on their year-end lists for 2025, I feel that I can shout out this woefully under-recognized singer-songwriter. His EP 5 4 1 is an example of what I was just talking about with Brian Dunne, sort of. These are, essentially, demo recordings for what ought to be a million-dollar pop-rock record, though Olsen’s songs sound just right in their simpler, stripped-down form. With melodies this good — they remind me of The Waterboys with a dash of L.A. Garage Sessions ’83 era Springsteen — you don’t need much (or any) production.
6. Joanne Robertson — Blurr
I’ve described this album as sounding like a woman softly singing and playing guitar at the bottom of a very deep well. (I call this genre “Baby Jessica-core.”) It would be simpler, I suppose, to just point to the album title as a signifier of its sonic properties. Operating at the nexus of singer-songwriter folk and dream pop, Robertson’s music is so mysterious and atmospheric it makes Jessica Pratt sound like Shania Twain.
7. Shallowater — God’s Gonna Give You A Million Dollars
This doesn’t sound at all like the Joanne Robertson record, but in my mind I’ve paired them together. This West Texas trio makes music as vast and dusty as their homeland, with slowcore grooves gradually giving way to rangy and unruly guitar jams. It’s a record that puts you in the well this time, though the feeling is less claustrophobic than starry-eyed and constantly trained on the flickers of light above.
8. Zach Top — Ain’t In It For My Health
Okay, I’ll stop with the “well” analogies. This album is nothing like the last two. It’s a country record I wish had come out in May or June instead of September, so I could have listened to it all summer, preferably on a pontoon boat. While most country artists his age tend to emulate the Willie ‘n’ Waylon-style outlaw music of the 1970s, Top is drawn more to the genre’s ’90s wing, a time when lantern-jawed and mustachioed neo-traditionalists like George Strait and Alan Jackson scored hit after hit about having fun on Saturday night and asking for forgiveness on Sunday morning. That’s what Top is after, and his music is a blast.
9. Guerilla Toss — You’re Weird Now
“Wacky” is one of those adjectives that automatically comes across as a pejorative in an artistic context. It denotes trying too hard to “be different,” to an annoying and even insufferable degree. But “wacky” need not be qualitative; It is, after all, merely a way to say that something is (according to Google) “funny or amusing in a slightly odd or peculiar way.” And that’s what You’re Weird Now is. I mean, “weird” is literally in the title. But Guerilla Toss has an adventurous spirit that doesn’t for a moment seem pretentious, which I would liken to jam-band music even if one of the songs didn’t feature Trey Anastasio (along with Stephen Malkmus!).
10. Jeff Tweedy — Twilight Override
I admit that I haven’t spent as much time with this as I should. It’s been a packed month for music, for one, but also this is a triple (!) record with 30 songs. And that’s on top of all the music Tweedy has put out in the past few years, on his own and with Wilco. He’s turned into Robert Pollard in late middle age, and he shows no signs of slowing down. Which is awesome, even if it inevitably makes each record feel like less of an event. Over time, I suspect I’ll feel about Twilight Override as I do other recent Tweedy projects. I’ll start with “this all kind of sounds the same” to “this all kind of sounds the same, in a good way” to “I can’t believe I used to think this all sounds the same, this really moves me.”
