Dub's 2025 fav albums (part 2)
Part 2 of Dub's fav albums of 2025. Pretty sure this got a content rating because of the phrase “shit sandwich”.
Upon reflection, part 1 is a more muted, tranquil selection; part 2 is a bit more lizard brain. A lot of my listening happened while running, could be part of it.
Alright - less ranty, more ranky:
10. Nourished by Time - The Passionate Ones
The bedroom R&B/walkman-era crooner-groovemeister's second full-length does not disappoint. He's got a sound all his own and deserves any and all publicity he's garnering these days.
Genre: grown-up bedroom R&B
Who will like this: everyone who was adequately held as a child should like this, everyone who was not should love it
Featured track: 925, a very dancy and joyful standout that I can't wait to see live
9. La Dispute - No One Was Driving the Car
Sometimes you get that specific sort of emo-hardcore dude who has Lots of Words. This album is that: it's a lyrics album, it has a lot to say, and it takes its time saying it. But man oh man - the lyrics are real damn good. Anyone out there trying to write the perfect song about the existential cruelty of mortality, it's ok, you can stop - they did it. More than once, actually. Grappling with aging and death across the spectrum of experience, from the pages of the royal We's collective autobiography that no one would read because it's too banal and depressing, to stark, unpoetically honest musings over a friend's fresh grave, and all the way over to a song structured as a screenplay of the rapture descending on a corporate sales banquet. There's also more - a whole lot more. Life is a shit sandwich and every day is just another bite, but don't wish those bites away: everything that happens in life will never happen again.
Genre: emo/hardcore but arty
Who will like this: emo/hardcore kids with arty leanings, depressed people, morbid people
Featured track: Top-Sellers Banquet, influenced by the film First Reformed and structured conceptually as a screenplay, swings from an emo banger sporting a Radiohead-esque rumbling bass groove to a long-form poem about the rapture and how your bosses are most definitely getting left behind. It is an impressive piece of work.
*bonus listen-for: when everything but the rhythm section drops out at 1:29, it fully wrecks
8. FACS - Wish Defense
Something about this album just feels so fresh. It's post-punk I guess, the vocals are half-spoken and sangfroid and for some reason sound vaguely British even though the band is of Chicago. But the space between notes is its own instrument, here. You can feel the space of the room in listening, the space between the bandmembers, the aural concept of this album - executed with such unity of vision from start to finish - each note given room to breathe, everything so intentional - reflects the experience of shared isolation better than words could ever convey. The sonic character of this album is the ..2nd... most unique on this list. More on that later.
Genre: post-punk
Who will like this: people thinking, walking in the cold
Featured track: Talking Haunted is a bare bones post punk tune that opens up into a meditative outro and is the thesis statement of the album's aural concept.
7. The Armed - THE FUTURE IS HERE AND EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE DESTROYED
Can I get a amen on this album title. This is the lizard brain stuff. I love it to death and I can't and don't want to help it. The band has switched into righteous rage mode here, employing POV vignettes of the worst people (those who don purity drag, for example) in a plea to completely dismantle the world that is 2025 and cauterize the fucking stump. Sonically it's way heavier than the prior album while taking some of the poppier arrangement and production elements along for the ride. Don't let them make you go numb. Don't let them kill your compassion. Don't let them claim this is balance. Don't. Ooo baby they scream so good.
Genre: noise hardcore but also somehow pop?
Who will like this: those who like lifting weights, those who daydream about getting pitted, those whom the news makes want to literally vomit, those who may or may not be open to getting recruited to an antifa sleeper cell
Featured track: A More Perfect Design reflects the ethos of the album in its screamed final section. It's a mission statement not to have your soul sucked out of your eyes and ears by the modern, right wing world. They think they're winning. Don't let them.
6. Algernon Cadwallader - Trying Not to Have a Thought
The existence of an Algernon album in 2025 feels like a gift. (What's next a Snowing reunion album NO I will not get greedy.) The special thing here is the deployment of the emo spirit and lyrical honestly towards political topics. It works - it works amazingly well. Over the ripping hammered/tapped mathy midwestern emo licks the Algernon is well known for, the lyrics address most everything that fucking sucks about America in 2025. The best track of the year, in my opinion, Attn MOVE, tells the real story of an extralegal violent police action (read: bombing of civilians) on a political/community group in Philadelphia in 1985 that I just can't believe I never heard of before. You knew about that? Just not me? Ok fine. It's storytelling and it's rage and the emo palette apparently works very well for this because emo is pre- and/or post-cynicism. It takes a courage and a lack of self-consciousness to just say how you feel in this way, loudly. Track after track rips tech billionaires, bad-faith oligarchs, et. al. The most important thing is the playing rips.
Genre: fourth-wave emo that has not lost a single step
Featured track: Revelation 420 has so many weedy poli-nuggets I feel like I'm back in college watching The Watchmen and Super High Me back to back. The line "History is a record, and it's never an accident when you find out what no one ever told you" hits so hard. (especially in Texas where they teach middle schoolers about states' rights but includeth not the state's articles of secession in their educational materials gahh damn I'm GETTING WORKED UP again, this is where all this bull shit STARTS They've already gotten away with it and I wish for deth)
5. Deafheaven - Lonely People with Power
Listening to Dream House (opening track on 2013's Sunbather of course) is to hear a genre being born in real time. Listening to Lonely People with Power is to hear the continuation of that legacy. It's near blasphemy to call this The Deafheaven album - that mantle is taken. But The Most Deafheaven Album? It covers their whole musical vocabulary, the arty interludes are back (the most compelling being Incidental II), I swear the screams are more dialed in, more dynamic and singlike, and it's absolutely stuffed with melodic ideas, it's bright, it's dark, it's an hour long and has the conventional number of songs for a full-length album, hell yeah.
Genre: blackgaze baby
Featured track: Winona is back to basics DH. It soars.
4. Endless Dive - Souvenances
The music application "spotify" does a thing that says what albums you most listened to in a calendar year. Mine was this. An ambient album in the Brian Eno sense that whether you do or don't pay attention to, it works as well either way. A mix of droney, post-rock acoustic riffs, field recordings (of children playing, and speaking cutely in French, mostly), and glitchy electronics for flavor, it's a beautiful, understated, peaceful and at-peace record.
Genre: post-rock by way of folktronica
Who will like this: those who like Bibio and/or Hammock
3. YHWH Nailgun - 45 Pounds
Here's the most unique thing I've heard in like a long time. This band came up with a new sound. A new sound! In 2025! How impossible does that sound! Featuring heavily are the rototoms, which one doesn't need to understand in a practicable sense when you can definitely understand it in your ribcage while hearing this piece of work. Most songs are between 1-2 mins long, bottled lightning. Screamed, arty screeds atop impossibly distorted and dissonant synth stabs and squeals girded by a steady shiatsu of mad scientist prog punk Zach Hill-ass beats. It's undeniable man, this is the new sound.
Genre: ... experimental noise punk? ...beat metal?
Who will like this: maybe no one. I dunno. If you're on its wavelength, it's got you.
Featured track: Changer, it might be the Most example on the album of the particular new-ass sound I'm talking about. The rototom drums are a force in this one.
2. Agriculture - The Spiritual Sound
This is a metal album. This is a singer-songwriter album. This is an album with such insane range and guts it is staggering to me. The first side kicks in with a really good cocktail of black metal and hardcore with wild and surprising song structures and excellent lead guitar work. Then side B happens - and wait is this Loveless? Dan's Love Song kicks off the crucial side B that defines Agriculture's crazy range. Bodhidharma follows, a metal tune blending the headbanger's ball with some Khanate and the best straight-up guitar solo of the year. Halleluiah is pleading, shockingly simple, and extremely not metal which maybe makes it metal? It's made up of elements you've heard before, but the way they are assembled here is just a knock-out. I'm having trouble describing it - you'll just have to listen.
Genre: black metal i guess, but also all the other stuff
Featured track: The Reply, the climactic final song, is a heavy postrocky gut punch with stargazing lyrical singing and! in the way I love bands that do "dynamics" and wait to deploy the scream til the most bestest moment (a la Alcest) - a big ole climactic scream before the bludgeoning waves of the outro. (be sure to listen to Bodhidharma too tho)
Cole Pulice - Land's End Eternal
Astral. Contemplative. Virtuosic. This is an album that feels revelatory, and feels personal. I could just listen to it daily and pretty nearly have. Cole is a sax player, but here contributes deft and nuanced guitar playing as well, creating a song cycle that has soundtracked my deepest moments of reflection, mourning, and thanksgiving since I first heard it. I have written obituaries to it. I have cradled infants at 1, 3, and 6 am to it. I have moved cross-country to it. All of those are literal. It is extremely personal. I think it is probably perfect. 1,000,000/1,000,000, AOTY.
Genre: astral and ambient jazz, which is a reductive description. Healing fuel. It's from another planet. Buy it!