Cam Recommends

You’d be forgiven for not making it to the bottom of my big list for highlights from 2025’s Q4 but I really don’t want the tunes from this fantastic hard-prog rock band from Finland to slip through the cracks. They actually put out two albums in 2025 and while I recommended their output from December for the previous post (obviously) I want to now recommend a track from the record they dropped in May. Not to repeat myself but I can’t conjure anything better than what I wrote two weeks back when I said their style of psychedelic post-rock “occasionally drifts into dreamy territory before compressing into little mini-novas of sound, exploding out in all directions with a grandiose, bright white heat."

Here’s where I usually drop a fairly long preamble in which I try to sum up my year in music to some degree or another, whether it’s trying to find disparate themes or some other common touchstone. But this year? 

Sometimes there’s a single element of a song that grabs me from the jump and makes me immediately pop it onto my shortlist for this very blog. In this case, I was 20 seconds into the first track off of the power-pop debut record from Addicus when I heard those glorious “chugga-chugga” distorted guitars that make up the underpinning of each verse. It’s a great song in total, of course, but man, those guitars…

 And here we are, finally in 2026. The last couple months of this year were even harder to keep track of than the first nine, but we were certainly rewarded with some incredible music in spite of all the chaos spinning in the world around us. I’ll be back in a week or two with my write-ups for favorite music overall from 2025, though, if you’ve been reading along, by this point you should have a pretty good idea of how my lists are going to shake out. Regardless, there’s always more music to discover! Here’s to 2026 and more art by humans, for humans, forever and ever, amen!

More than a decade ago, it seemed like pure synthwave was poised to take over the world. Tycho hit the mainstream, Kavinsky was everywhere in the wake of Drive and this thing called “vaporwave” was on the come-up. Fast forward and it feels like vaporwave coiled in on itself and splintered into 1000 micro-genres and “low-fi beats to relax and study to” metastasized into a thing. So I was just delighted to hit play on this great little album from Bali-based producer Ørbita and be transported into an alternate reality where synthwave continued to carry just a bit of an edge. The whole record zips by in less than 30 minutes but give “Space Runner” a shot for a sample of the excellent neon-streaked sonic world presented throughout.

The forward motion in this track by heavy hitting, jazz-inflected electronic producer Bruise Blood is a wonderous thing to get caught up in. Starting small and then building and building and building as it layers  different sounds, first drums, bassline, then little electronic melodies, then more drums, then more little electronic melodies, and so on until it finally hits a groove that carries it all home in a lightning fast five minutes.

This stunning musical journey from Belgium rockers Gros Couer starts like a folksy/funky psychedelic jam from Altin Gün before ramping up the distortion on the guitars and dropping into much more arena-ready riffs before blasting into the stratosphere with a heavy beat and muscular bassline. It chugs along until it meanders into yet another musical mode, with hand drumming, hypnotic drones, a head nodding heavy guitar loop and the occasional electronic synth blast as it fades into the setting red sun. 

I've teased this topic before, but in lieu of publishing my 2025 "best of" lists before the year is actually over (I'm going to be disciplined to my format here, by the way, in that I plan to still do a quarter four notable releases list and then the year-end wrap up--hopefully by mid January at the latest), I'd like to highlight some of the best cover art that I saw this year. I truly love good album art and it is a shame that you generally have to kind of go out of your way to find it at a large enough scale to appreciate: whether in "real life" by finding said records on vinyl, or digitally where most streaming services de-prioritize album art to the point of making smaller and smaller thumbnails. But even if it's just a few more clicks into an artists Bandcamp profile, it's always worth the effort to take a closer look at any record art that catches the eye. I'm not someone who necessarily "sees" anything when listening to music, so it's not that album art represents some kind of jumping off point I need to complete my listening experience (though no shade towards anyone who does process music vis a vis visuals that way), but rather I find it a useful element in interpreting what the artists themselves may wish to communicate with the music contained within that literal artistic wrapper. It’s not all-encompassing of course, different artists place different levels of importance on the physical trappings of the medium. Regardless, ever since I spent hours pouring over the liner notes of that first CD pressing of Radiohead’s Kid A back when I was 16 years old in 2000, I’ve been fascinated and enchanted by album art. Presented in no particular order, and clicking on each cover should take you to an appropriate site to listen :)

A minor-key garage rocker that’s such an earworm that it might take a few spins to catch how utterly dark the lyrical content is: “Maybe I’m just already dead or I’m living in a simulation. But honestly it makes me depressed that this is the best thing someone could invent.” Later, before a bonkers guitar solo from the featured Buckethead, lead singer Sonia Sturino dips into straight nihilism: “Here daydreaming of annihilation: maybe we should just hit reset, it’d be the best thing to stop it all and start it over again…[but] I think we’d go and wreck it all again, caught in a loop pattern.” And yet, it’s catchy as hell and, honestly, I can’t actually debate any of the points made here so it’s best to maybe just sing along. 

If you’re reading this near the publish date then statistically it’s likely at least chilly outside, if not outright cold and dreary. Something about the change put me in the mood for Mount Eerie’s seminal 2009 record, Wind’s Poem. Mount Eerie (and the man behind the project, Phil Elverum) mean a lot of things to a dedicated number of people, whether it’s from the earlier Microphones projects to his grappling with his wife’s death in the devastating A Crow Looked at Me there’s a lot in the back catalog to dig into that’s worth your time. If you somehow missed Wind’s Poem however, now’s the perfect time to experience this simultaneously bleak and hopeful outing that combines elements of bedroom indie with folk, noise, drone and black metal. It can be a harrowing listen at times, but it’s a record I think about regularly for its raw emotional power and ability to completely capture you in its world. 

CV Vision’s recent album, Release the Beast is a head-spinning ride through half a dozen different genres and styles with maybe the only throughline being the imperative to just, like, “keep it chill, man.” The record starts with a Bibio-adjacent wobbly guitar melody, laughing vocal snippet samples and a loping beat that contains shades of the fabled Land of the Loops. But the very next track veers into sunny 60’s vocal-lead psychedelia, only to be followed by a woozy dubbed out cut that wraps itself around dial-tone samples. And the record continues in this hazy toggle between interrelated but still disparate sounds with every track until we come to “A Memory” which falls into the psychedelia side of things but carries itself with such immaculate shag-carpet swagger that it can’t help but be a standout in a record of ear-catching tunes. 

The sparkling chorus feels like it could soundtrack a 90’s allergy medication commercial but in an alternate reality where TV commercials won Nobel Peace Prizes. I spent so long trying to come up with that analogy to capture the feeling of this track that I just ask you to listen to the song now to see what I mean. 

I was sadly not familiar with long-running Zambian rock outfit We Intend to Cause Havoc (or WITCH for short) until their record, SOGOLO from this summer hit my radar with the outstanding “Kamusale” as the kickoff track. Starting with an aggressive guitar riff and chanting it quickly folds into a growling guitar loop that roils beneath nearly the rest of the song. It builds with drums, group vocals and buried organ synths before unleashing some gritty guitar solos and even a crazed harmonica but it’s the stunning lead singer’s performance that brings it all together as a unified, exhilarating chaotic blast of sound.