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2026 Best Albums So Far (Jan-June)

I try my best not to talk too much about the actual act of writing this blog and the intersections with my personal life and mental health because, well, (A) it’s not really fun to write about and, b (B) it really can’t be fun to read about in a space that’s meant for music recommendations. That said, an astute reader can certainly compare the last six months worth of writing here with any previous 6 month time period and see that I’ve slowed down significantly and I skipped doing a quarter one (and now) a quarter two round-up. Suffice it to say, I’ve been in a bit of a dark tunnel for a while and it’s been hard to motivate myself to write anything down. Fortunately, I haven’t reached any severe levels of music anhedonia yet, so, despite a few troughs, I’ve mostly been able to still engage with quite a few awesome new releases so far this year. I really, really, really want to get back in the habit of posting here but I don’t want to leave too much behind either. I feel kind of daunted to try to “catch up” from here, but sometimes, you just need to give yourself a goal and go for it. Plus, this can hopefully reset the template here and get back to the “post 3 to 4 times a week” schedule with single item posts in the 250-1000 word range with occasional longer form posts here and there and a quarterly round up. I can’t promise the quarterly this year, but I think I can at least plant a flag right here and run down all the new albums this year that have had an impact on me. I must confess, I feel kind of helpless (and still intimidated) at the amount of music and with my own self-doubt I can only summon a kind of resolve to just allow myself my worst writerly instincts and also let myself off the hook, length-wise.

So reader, if you’ll indulge me, this will be as fast and dirty a list as I can make it. I really want to just get this out there and move forward with a lot of good music to come (and a lot I’ve certainly missed). So, some of these might only be one word. Some will have prose as purple as a certain 90’s children’s TV dinosaur. Some will be the dreaded comparisons to and mashups between other bands and or/genres. Some will be the even more dreaded food similes. I’ll certainly mix up my similes with my metaphors, definitely end some phrases with a few propositions and possibly have more than one run-on sentence. Also, no particular order, just going down a big list I made (so, roughly, in some kind of order from the beginning of the year but, you know, mostly just in the order I added to the list). With all that out of the way. Here we go!


(Tidal Playlist here if you want to follow along and most links go to Bandcamp pages which allow free preview streams so it's easy to listen.)


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My Favorite Music from 2025

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? 

It’s been a year. 


Despite everything, it was an incredible year for music and I’m excited to share with you what stood out to me the most this year. In the past, I’ve broken this up into two separate posts with favorite albums and songs but, fittingly I think for 2025, this year it’s all coming to you at once. Below are links to Tidal playlists for my favorite 50 albums, 100 songs, and assortment of EPs. 


2025 has been one of the most challenging in my life so far. Music has been one of the few balms to get me through it. I don’t know how I can wrap up any kinds of thoughts on this most fraught of years with any kind of coherence or, really, relevance. So I have to remind myself of my own refrain at concerts: “Less Talk! More Rock!” and just get into it. I've published 3 playlists on Tidal if you'd like to listen along.


Happy listening and here’s to 2026!





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Favorite Album Covers of 2025

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 :)



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2025 Quarter 3 Notable Albums

Time again for another round up of great music released in the last few months. Dear reader, at this juncture, I do need to acknowledge the general slow-down around these parts for these exact three past months of what we’ve deemed this slice of the year as quarter 3 (and, yes, some of these are from June and represent tunes I didn’t quite get to). So I imagine this will be more scattershot and probably shorter than most. Regardless, we’ve had some amazing releases and I’m sure I’ll dig up more as I start to work through all the things I’ve missed this year already. So, without further ado and like last time, here’s a rapid-fire list along with links to Bandcamp pages, recommended tunes and, of course, the link to the playlist. Happy listening and happy Fall!



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2025 Quarter 2 Notable Albums

As someone now in their 40’s (and living through this current hellscape, natch)  I think I need to stop prefacing everything I say with some asterisk about how busy I am and how much a whirlwind everything is and blah blah blah. So I’ll save all that and just skip to a roundup of some of the incredible music released in the last few months. The only reason the aforementioned preamble might be relevant here is to note that I found June in particular a very hard month in which to carve time out for new music discovery so I will probably have some major catching up to do come the quarter 3 roundup. And with that, you’ll notice a few write-ups below from March or maybe earlier; I try to keep ahead of the wave but there’s just so much good music out there I can’t catch everything!

Same as before, here’s a rapid-fire list of music that I’ve both written about (which I’ll link to for expanded thoughts) and which I haven’t (and I still might highlight any of those for further discussion in the future). And, of course, I made a playlist with a single song from each of the records of this list as a bit of a thumbnail on the year. To make it a bit more worthwhile, I’ll exclude selecting tracks I’ve already recommended on the blog. Listen along below or here. 





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2025 Quarter 1 Notable Albums

It’s already April?! Well, three months into this whirlwind of a year and there has already been a staggering amount of good music released into the world. I wanted to do a general round-up of the albums that have caught my attention so far this year. While the whole point of this blog is to point out things I like, this space is also going to serve as a general clearing house for albums I’ve been wanting to write about but haven’t quite gotten to it–the sheer forward momentum of my life coupled with the near-relentless drops of awesome new music has made it very slippery for me to keep my footing so lots of stuff has fallen through the cracks (both on this blog and in my personal life but that’s for another time and place to tell). So, below, in roughly release order, is a list and some thoughts about music I think is worth your time that’s come out since January. Generally, if I’ve already written about something, I’ll just post a link and move on, but I’ll reserve the right to delve into more detail about some of these later on :) 

Oh, and I made a playlist with a single song from each of the records of this list as a bit of a thumbnail on the year. To make it a bit more worthwhile, I’ll exclude selecting tracks I’ve already recommended on the blog or put on the regular updating playlist.  Listen along to my Quarter 1 highlights here. 




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