Geese—a band of four 23-year-old longtime pals from Brooklyn and Manhattan—represent such an exciting jolt of rock ’n’ roll possibility that they successfully convinced marquee producer Kenny Beats to change his name in order to work with them. When the members of Geese were still in elementary school, Beats was showing up on increasingly big hip-hop records by Smoke DZA, ScHoolboy Q, Freddie Gibbs, and Vince Staples. But as he doggedly pursued Geese through 2024 and convinced them to give his new Los Angeles digs a try, they offered a caveat: He should drop the Beats once and for all and just be Kenny Blume. The swap proved worth it. Together, Geese and Blume made one of this year’s truly great rock records, finding an often-hidden seam between old-school indie-rock idiosyncrasy and the mainstream’s explosive power. *Getting Killed* feels like a burst of new life. Geese signed a pandemic-era deal for their high-school debut, *Projector*, before raising the stakes with their indulgent, discursive, and beguiling *3D Country*. But their flock unexpectedly grew early in 2025, when *Heavy Metal*—the brilliant solo debut of singer and leader Cameron Winter, actually released late in 2024—became an unexpected and uncanny breakthrough. Fans of that album may recognize its tunefulness at the start of Geese’s “Cobra,” where lilting keyboards indeed conjure “Love Takes Miles.” Aside from Winter’s singular voice and barbarically blunt lyrics, though, the similarities stop there: *Getting Killed*is a savage and beautiful thing, anchored by the athletic rhythm section of bassist Dom DiGesu and drummer Max Bassin and given a serrated edge by guitarist Emily Green. Where “Islands of Men” moves from a warped Rolling Stones strut into art-rock transcendence, “Bow Down” is nervous and mean start to finish, Winter howling about lost love over an instrumental that feels like heart palpitations. Hinging around howled lines about bombs in cars, opener “Trinidad” indeed lands like a piece of twisted scrap metal. Geese, though, can be tender and exquisite. “Half Real” is an anthem for holding love close as the world tries to chip away at it, while the climactic soul stunner “Au Pays du Cocaine” is a let’s-stay-together update for our era of shared discontent. Geese have recently flamed the eternal embers of rock-savior dialogues, their imaginative but relentless approach suggesting for many talk about the next Strokes or Radiohead. And, sure, that might happen. But more importantly, Geese have simply done what so many great rock bands in the past have done—they’ve learned the lessons of their forebears, ripped them apart, and reordered them in a way that sounds as thrilling to them as to us. “I’m getting killed by a pretty good life,” Winter warbles on the title track, echoing Neil Young a half-century on. Whether you’re in heaven or hell, it’s hard not to nod at least a little bit of assent to one of rock’s most electrifying new crews and gripping new voices.
After the stylistic sprawl of 2022’s *Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You*, Big Thief’s sixth album finds the group bringing their increasingly distinctive sound closer to the vest in a literal sense: *Double Infinity* is their first album as a proper trio, following the departure of bassist Max Oleartchik. As a result, these nine songs—woolly, warm, and with frissons of electricity coursing through their veins—capture Big Thief in a state of ragged intimacy, every melodic turn and shift in instrumentation expanding and contracting like a pair of lungs. The rumbling drum fills and strummy framework of “Words” seemingly stretch for miles on end, while the nearly seven-minute “No Fear” carries a faint gothiness in its inky guitar lines that drip around Adrianne Lenker’s bruising vocals. More so than on any other Big Thief album to date, rock music is the name of the game here; even “Grandmother,” which features ambient legend Laraaji lending vocal incantations, bursts and blooms in a manner not unlike what was coming out of the 1970s Laurel Canyon scene. Wild-eyed and positively hot-blooded, *Double Infinity* is the work of a band that never stops evolving, even as they continue to sound singularly like themselves.
Over the past few years, the North Carolina natives have carved out their own distinct (and influential) lane in indie rock: *Twin Plagues*, the band’s 2021 breakthrough, introduced fans to their noisy hybrid of shoegaze and country, while 2023’s *Rat Saw God* helped kick off a new generation’s alt-country revival. Wednesday’s sixth album, *Bleeds*, hones their signature sound—often gnarly, occasionally sublime—with lyrics by bandleader Karly Hartzman that play out like contemporary Southern gothic short stories unfolding inside of dusty dives or along the banks of creeks in her hometown of Greensboro. *Bleeds* arrives in the wake of a pivotal time for the five-piece band (singer/guitarist Hartzman, guitarist MJ Lenderman, lap steel/pedal steel player Xandy Chelmis, bassist/pianist Ethan Baechtold, and drummer Alan Miller): Hartzman wrote much of the album during a grueling world tour, in the midst of which she and Lenderman ended their six-year romantic relationship. But the songs of *Bleeds* are intimate in a different way entirely, built around strikingly detailed anecdotes picked up from conversations with friends or overheard bar wisdom. “Weeds grew into the springs of the trampoline/You saw a pit bull puppy pissing off a balcony,” Hartzman sings on “Wound Up Here by Holdin On,” jointly inspired by a line from a friend’s poem and a story about a body pulled out of a West Virginia creek. A rerecorded version of “Phish Pepsi,” first released on Hartzman and Lenderman’s 2021 collab EP *Guttering*, recounts a weird, stoned teenage memory (“We watched a Phish concert and *Human Centipede*/Two things I now wish I had never seen”). And their small-town transcendentalism is at its best on “Elderberry Wine”—the prettiest they’ve ever sounded, though not without its ennui.
As one of a few shouty, abrasive, angular bands coalescing around Brixton live venue and rehearsal space The Windmill during the late 2010s, shame found themselves being ushered into a pigeonhole. Alongside the likes of Squid, black midi, and Black Country, New Road, they were heralded as the new wave of post-punk by a UK music press and A&R industry keen to have uncovered the next fertile scene. Wisely, the five-piece did their best to elude those strictures on the follow-ups to 2018 debut *Songs of Praise*. But reflecting on 2021’s *Drunk Tank Pink* and *Food for Worms* (2023), records that benefitted from ideas drawn from psych-rock, folk, jazz, and even singing lessons, shame began to wonder if some of their urgency had been thinned out. As a result, *Cutthroat* arrives with the band’s horizons still broad but their sound revitalized. The title track, with its combustion of riffs and groove, and the agitated polemic of “Cowards Around” captures the bracing, confrontational energy of the band’s live shows. It’s an opening salvo that establishes the vim and efficiency with which they go on to try out rockabilly (“Quiet Life”), the cockeyed but melodic sound of early Pavement (“Plaster”), sing-along indie pop (“Spartak”), and a collision of Portuguese folk, disco, and New Wave (“Lampião”). Against this absorbing backdrop, singer Charlie Steen muses on just how conflicted and paradoxical the human condition is. And he does it with a little more self-assurance and a bit less vulnerability and doubt than before. “Well, you can follow your fashions/You can follow your cliques/And I feel sorry for you/For feeling sorry for me,” he declares on “Spartak.” *Cutthroat* is the sound of shame continuing to explore their sound—and arriving somewhere increasingly unique.
David Byrne’s last album, 2018’s *American Utopia*, wasn’t merely an album: It was a sprawling multimedia work that encompassed music, a stage show, and a film that captured the magic of its performance. In fact, it was so sprawling that its chronology even includes a lengthy period of dormancy, between opening on Broadway at the end of 2019 and restarting in 2021 after COVID restrictions were eased. “During the pandemic, of course, I wanted to write new songs, but I felt like what was happening was bigger than anything I could write about,” Byrne tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe of that unexpected gap. “And I didn’t quite know how to address it.” While the songs that make up his eighth album under his given name, *Who Is the Sky?*, recorded with the musically elastic Ghost Train Orchestra, aren’t directly a product of that time, there are threads and themes that trace back to it. “I realized that some of these new songs are coming out of that,” he adds. The most obvious is probably the ode to his living quarters “My Apartment Is My Friend,” where Byrne ruminates on how intimate that physical space has become. \"So forgive me if I hesitate, if a tear comes now and then,” he sings. “You stood by me when darkness fell/My apartment is my friend.” Byrne has always had a gift for making the specific, and even the fantastical, seem universal. “Moisturizing Thing” plays like a Hollywood sci-fi, starring Byrne himself, in which he tries an anti-aging skin treatment only to turn into a toddler, forcing him to see the world through another’s eyes. He’s constantly asking more of himself in these songs: He questions a smiling religious teacher who’s gorging himself on hors d’oeuvres (“I Met the Buddha at a Downtown Party”); he ponders the place he’s been put in history (“The Avant Garde”); he wonders how his wife just understands things so naturally (“She Explains Things to Me”); he sees life in cycles of happiness and pain, searching and resolution (“Everybody Laughs”). And he does it all with the playfulness, grace, and naked, life-affirming joy of a musical elder statesman who has never lost his curious, creative spark.
Nation of Language is one of the 2020s’ undeniable indie-rock success stories, as the Brooklyn trio’s strange but delectable alchemy of pulsing electronic pop and the oaky, baroque sounds of late-2000s indie have reached a steadily growing audience with each release. You’ve likely heard “Weak in Your Light” from 2023’s *Strange Disciple* if you’ve turned on a single TV show in the last few years, and their fourth album *Dance Called Memory* continues their hot streak of broadly appealing and emotionally resonant songcraft. With frequent collaborator and LCD Soundsystem live member Nick Millhiser behind the boards, these 10 songs sparkle and bounce with every rhythmic twist, as lead singer Ian Richard Devaney’s angelic vocals hover above the proceedings. And lest you think they’re becoming easy to pin down, *Dance Called Memory* has a few tricks up its sleeve: Witness the brittle backbeats that make up the framework of “In Another Life” or the glistening shoegaze textures that course through “Now That You’re Gone.” It’s these subtle tweaks to their sound that prove that, even as they grow in popularity, Nation of Language continues to evolve in new and surprising ways.
With a title taken from a quote about a lethal self-driving Tesla crash, La Dispute’s fifth album revels in observations on modern malaise. The lightning-fast advancement of technology, the chaos of existential uncertainty, the unblinking eye of the surveillance state, the stultifying pressure of societal expectations, and all manner of personal crises take a bow on *No One Was Driving the Car*. The first La Dispute album produced entirely by the band, it’s the result of far-flung writing sessions conducted in the UK, Australia, the Philippines, and the band’s home state of Michigan. Partly inspired by the 2017 Paul Schrader film *First Reformed*, the 14-track album is a post-hardcore epic that revolves around lead vocalist Jordan Dreyer’s angsty narratives about the world we live in.
Cate Le Bon’s gently surrealistic art-pop has a way of conjuring scenes that feel both unreachably distant and archetypically close at the same time: a mirrored palace on a rocky outcropping, a cryptic ritual conducted by robed figures on a freezing beach—the kind of stuff you wake up from thinking, “It must mean something,” without quite knowing what. *Michelangelo Dying* forms a kind of triptych with 2019’s *Reward* and 2022’s *Pompeii*, channeling the dreamy stiffness of late-’70s Bowie (“Mothers of Riches,” “Body as a River”) and late-’80s Cocteau Twins (“Jerome”) into a sound that feels totally—and at this point, almost inescapably—her own. And should you wonder if an artist so heady and poised would deign to write a love song, there’s six aching minutes of “Is It Worth It (Happy Birthday)?”
The members of Parcels had barely graduated high school when they left Byron Bay, Australia for Berlin in 2014, five friends sharing a dream and a cramped one-bedroom apartment. Within a year, they had released their debut EP and signed a label deal; by 2017, they were collaborating with Daft Punk on the band’s single “Overnight,” a track that would become the dance icons’ final production. After two albums—2018’s self-titled debut and 2021’s double LP *Day/Night*—and nearly a decade in motion, Parcels finally took a break in 2023. For six months, they lived their ordinary lives while working on songs individually before reconvening to finish them together. Whereas *Day/Night* was recorded in a single studio and meticulously planned out, their third album *LOVED* was made more loosely, with sessions in Berlin, Byron Bay, Sydney, and Mexico City, and a go-with-the-flow approach that let the album emerge on its own. “It\'s kind of like Parcels back to our most authentic self, in a way,” bassist Noah Hill told Apple Music’s Travis Mills in April 2025. “This one feels a lot more pure and direct, and more to what we naturally have inside of us.” From opener “Tobeloved,” *LOVED* is dotted with moments of laughter and colorful ad-libs that drop listeners right in the booth with them. That joy permeates the production, a vintage blend of peppy keys, hand-claps, chest-swelling crescendos, and funky guitar riffs that beg for a little shimmy. They also bring tenderness: “Ifyoucall” offers unconditional love with the warmth of a long hug, and “Leaveyourlove” is a starry-eyed declaration of devotion. The latter, written in Mexico while watching the sun set over the ocean, became the album’s anchor point. “We were all writing our own individual verses about our own love stories at the time, and wanting to lean into that directness and not being afraid to talk about love so directly,” said Hill. “This track just clicked with all of us instantly.” But *LOVED* also refers to the emotion in the past tense. The disco fizz of “Yougotmefeeling” sugarcoats the realization that a relationship is past saving, and the more delicate “Summerinlove” aches with post-breakup yearning. Other songs like “Safeandsound” and “Finallyover” embrace the unknowable future with optimism, while closer “Iwanttobeyourlightagain” circles back to where it all began: “I remember when we were green/Five people and two sets of keys/Trying so hard to be seen.”
Five years after 2020’s *Freeze, Melt*, Cut Copy has only grown more nuanced and self-reflective, with soft-sung leader Dan Whitford leaning into confiding closeness across *Moments*. That suits the Melbourne band’s warm, tender synth-pop, which can still flash back to their more extroverted past with selectively clubby touches. American singer Kate Bollinger lends dreamy guest vocals amid some weepy steel guitar on “Belong to You,” a track that balances melancholy and motion in a way that feels distinctive to Cut Copy. The like-minded “Still See Love” explores the stark duality between its peppy verse and pensive chorus, while “When This Is Over” taps a poignant choir of children and “Gravity” morphs its way through a slippery, suite-like structure. Yet, even when a song starts off mellow, the band often introduces some engaging new facet near the end, from the vocodered mantra closing the slow-burn title track to the burbling layers coming to a head during the final minute of “More Alive.” This album may be fairly low-key, but Cut Copy still knows how to hypnotize with sneaky hooks and quiet sincerity.
Listening to Purity Ring’s panoramic synth-pop has always felt a bit like stepping into a futuristic fantasyland, so it makes perfect sense that Megan James and Corin Roddick would envision their self-titled fourth album as the soundtrack to a *Final Fantasy*-style RPG that exists only in their own minds. But while *purity ring* comes loaded with fleet-footed, breakbeat-driven bops (“many lives,” “between you and shadows”) ideal for whipping through levels at warp speed and slaying enemies with militaristic precision, the album’s more manic tracks flow naturally into meditative soundscapes (“part ii,” “mistral”) that reflect the more exploratory aspects of gaming, where you’re content to just wander through and marvel at the digital vistas around you. And even if you’re not a headset-sporting joystick jockey, there’s no resisting the emotional undertow of “imanocean,” where James turns off the pitch-shifting vocal filters and Roddick eases off the electro-freakery to deliver an acoustic-driven, heart-pumping indie-pop anthem.
Since their first project as Frost Children (2020’s *Aviation Creates Adventurous Beginnings*), the duo of Angel and Lulu Prost have honed their chaotic maximalism while helping to define what exactly the “indie sleaze revival” means—is the trend a sound or a feeling? If the free-wheeling, red-blooded party-rock anthems of the St. Louis-raised, New York-based duo are any indication, it’s the latter—drawing from hyperpop, indie rock, electroclash, and meme mischief, Frost Children’s music is hard to pin down, but easy to dance to. On *SISTER*, the duo wrings every last drop of pathos from a serotonin-heavy blend of scuzzy bloghouse, mid-aughts dance-punk, and festival-core EDM. The spirit of indie sleaze is alive on “ELECTRIC,” with its buzzsaw synths and Rapture-esque vocals, while Kim Petras collab “RADIO” channels sleazy late-2000s electropop. Setting aside their previous work’s occasional tongue-in-cheek humor, the prevailing mood is earnest: On the title track, stripped-down ’90s rock shimmers with a hyperpop sheen as the siblings recall the dandelions and hand-me-downs of their Midwestern upbringing: “The two of us, driving down a roundabout life again/It’s the two of us/Sister.”
In 2024, Bright Eyes’ inimitable figurehead Conor Oberst lent his distinctively black-and-blue vocals to “The World is Dangerous,” a dusky and ruminative tune from Alynda Segarra’s eighth album as Hurray for the Riff Raff, *The Past is Still Alive*. Clearly, the collab rubbed off on Oberst, whose EP *Kids Table*—a follow-up to 2024’s Bright Eyes album *Five Dice, All Threes*—finds him creatively melding with Segarra directly (the languid, slide guitar-laden, and exquisitely Bright Eyes-y “Dyslexic Palindrome”) while taking a seeming inspiration from their own folk-rock travelogues. With lyrical invectives against hipsters, Ronald Reagan, and various clothing retailers, “1st World Blues” has a first-wave ska feel that makes you think, if only for a second, that Oberst has busted out a porkpie hat and two-tone suit in the studio. Meanwhile, the string-laden opening title track offers a jauntier spin on Bright Eyes’ grandiose 2020s work, showcasing a project that is still constantly evolving even as its leader’s legend continues to grow.
“Hello, stranger,” Neko Case sings off the top of her eighth album, and it’s a welcome reintroduction, given that *Neon Grey Midnight Green* arrives seven years after its predecessor. Case spent a good chunk of her time away writing her best-selling memoir, *The Harder I Fight the More I Love You*, a no-holds-barred account of her hardscrabble upbringing, and in a sense, *Neon Grey Midnight Green* feels like a continuation of that introspective work. As the first entirely self-produced album of her career, it provides an unfiltered glimpse into her musical mind, where she conjures a surrealist swirl of classic-country balladry, lush ’60s orchestral pop, dissonant punk, and avant-garde experimentation. It’s also a profoundly personal record, informed by the deaths of some longtime indie-rock allies: On “Winchester Mansion of Sound,” she pays tribute to Flat Duo Jets lead vocalist Dexter Romweber with a baroque piano lullaby that gives way to a lovingly nostalgic invocation of the “Down Down Baby” clapping-game sing-along. On the equally haunting and heavenly “Match-Lit,” she and guest Richard Reed Parry of Arcade Fire summon the spirit of The Sadies’ Dallas Good by quoting a song they all bonded over, the Mickey & Sylvia/Everlys standard “Love Is Strange.” At times, *Neon Grey Midnight Green*’s dream-state logic leads Case into bizarre uncharted territory: The theatrical spoken-word jazz poem “Tomboy Gold” is a lot closer to Laurie Anderson than Loretta Lynn. But while such outré excursions mark *Neon Grey Midnight Green* as the most eccentric entry in Case’s canon to date, the album is ultimately anchored by towering, string-swept torch songs—like “Wreck” and “An Ice Age”—that make a convincing case for Case’s gale-force voice to be recognized as the eighth wonder of the world.
“If you understood who I was back then, then you’d understand there was already no box for me,” Rochelle Jordan says of her musical journey in a behind-the-scenes mini-documentary for her album *Through the Wall*. Since her 2011 debut, the Los Angeles-based British Canadian artist has been carving out her own lane, a vintage yet futuristic fusion of ’90s R&B and pop, hip-hop, soul, and electronic music. Jordan’s fascination with the latter stems back to her childhood, when her older brother blasted jungle, drum ’n’ bass, UK garage, house—all shades of dance—in his bedroom, the rhythms seeping through her walls. The album’s title nods to those formative experiences, but it also carries spiritual meaning. Among the obstacles Jordan faced in her career, one of the most challenging was internal: impostor syndrome. As she learned to dismantle those mental barriers and step fully into her power, *Through the Wall* found its roots. Produced mainly by longtime collaborator KLSH (and additionally Byron the Aquarius, Terry Hunter, and DāM FunK), *Through the Wall* bumps like a night in the club, with luxe house grooves that could take dance floors from midnight to sunrise. That sparkling feeling of freedom lives in songs like “Sweet Sensation” and “Close 2 Me,” which radiate the exuberance of living in the moment, whether out with friends or wrapped up with a lover. Slipping into a sing-rap flow, Jordan makes room to flex on “Ladida” and “Around,” her earned braggadocio strutting like it’s dripped head-to-toe in the Versace she name-drops. Even after breakups (“Sum,” “Get It Off”), she’s still thriving, looking fly, and living in her exes’ heads rent-free. *Through the Wall* also pauses to reflect. On “Eyes Shut,” Jordan observes the struggles of those around her, questioning connection in a digital world and seeking purpose. “Got dopamine and can’t feel my soul/I just feel like there’s something more,” she muses. But the title track (“TTW”) asserts her resilience: “When you really wanna push through, okay/Let them say what they want to/Bussin’ through the wall.”
