I find I typically have something halfway interesting to say about almost all of the couple hundred albums I listen to every year. There are so many bands making so many good albums every year that instead of making futile attempt at creating a "best of" list, I’m just gonna talk a little bit about every damn album I like. I'll be using the never tried and absolute untrue Chaotic Neutral sorting method of "the order I actually listened to them". Hooray?
PLEASE SUPPORT MUSICIANS. Every album I can find on Bandcamp will include a Bandcamp embed you can click through to buy the album from the band or label. Please buy music or merch or go to shows and sing along! Without our support, these wonderful musicians can't continue to exist, y'all. Your dozen or two plays on Spotify unfortunately don't mean shit when ends need to meet.
(I know we don't all have the means to do it, so if you like something here and can't afford it, message me and I'll buy it for you! Seriously!)
I didn't listen to this album nearly enough but if you're a fan of indie/emo rock in any way shape or form, Sleep In. is good as hell. They're a fun, light, airy band with a mathy edge and excellent melodic vocals. This one reminds me a lot of Mae at times, or if you want a really deep cut, the old Negative Progression band Counterfit, who I miss very dearly.
I don't remember where I found about these folks but boy do I love them. This is their second EP in as many years and if you're a fan of melodic SoCal pop-punk/skate-punk then you'll enjoy the clean vocal harmonies and whoas that pepper the album. Their music leans heavily into nostalgia for growing up and evokes that kind of dark and anxiety-riddled adventures that much of the movies and shows of the 80s and 90s were built on. Like imagine if The Goonies formed a pop-punk band and you've got We Found A Map. They remind me a lot of one of my low-key all-time favorites, The Braces.
What happens when two of my favorite west coast bands put out a split? I buy it and enjoy the hell out of it, I guess! CWR was one of my favorite bands to see live back when I lived in the Bay Area and they continue to write great melodic pop punk about San Francisco and Oakland and their ups and downs that I love shouting along with ("How many pills will it take to cure everything!", "Maybe we're all lost and lonely, we fell in love without an exit plan!"). On the other side of the split, I can think of little more that I love than Todd and Kevin trading vocal duties back and forth on "Can't Sleep Gonna Die" or the great harmonies in the chorus of "Showing Teeth". These bands are the reason why I love being able to trot out to something like La Escalera Fest every year.
I'm just realizing that this is the first LP Bridges to Nowhere has dropped in like three years! They've been consistently release singles and EPs and other fun stuff in between the LPs which is awesome 'cause it shows they clearly love what they're doing. BTN plays a style of mid-tempo melodic punk that's similar to newer Descendents albums, maybe mixed with a bit of that European melodic punk like No Fun At All or Millencolin. Of course the album still has absolute rippers like "Nobody Else". Perhaps the highlight of the album is the acoustic version of Architects' "Deathwish" that caps off the album which is so extremely good I won't even be able to give it credit by just talking about it Go listen to it! (Which is also a note to check out their covers EP which is very good!)
Released on Guerilla Asso (the label run by Guerilla Poubelle's frontman, Till), this album had me from the opening second of the opening riff. Versus You plays music that'd easily fit anywhere in the late 90s EpiFat catalogue, but more importantly, they remind of one of my favorite and first punk bands I ever got into: The Gamits. My goodness they remind me so much of The Gamits. They play a style of gruff melodic punk that the Denver area is known for even though they're from... Luxembourg?! That’s right, the smallest country in the world (it still is, right?) has an undeniably great punk band! Anyway, listen if you're a fan of The Gamits, The Lawrence Arms, Audio Karate or like, hell, the chorus from "Home" could be from a No Trigger song. tl;dr: Listen to this damn record, nerds.
I get flustered trying to come up with words to describe Problem Daughter to folks because they tend to escape all comparisons I can come up with. And then it flusters me even more because I know all my damn friends would fall in love with this band if I could only convince them to fuckin' listen!
Problem Daughter is one of the catchiest bands I've ever heard with some of the best damn musicianship you're ever gonna find. They're the kind of band you can tell is having as much fun playing their songs as you are singing along to 'em.
After how much I loved their last LP, I was kinda worried my expectations for this one couldn't possibly be met. Good news: I never had a damn thing to worry about! Every song has like five tempo changes but feels entirely cohesive. Every song has amazing vocal harmonies and gang vocals that feel expressly written for the purpose of singing along. Every song is gonna worm its way into your brain until it's all you can think about. The album's as near-perfect as an album can be.
I'm hashtag-blessed to live in an area they tour through because they're just as good live as they are on tape. To the two people who might actually read this far: Please fucking listen to this band and support them as best as you can. They should be the biggest band in the universe.
They're already the best one.
FFO: The Flatliners?? Direct Hit, I guess?? I dunno, they're in a league of their own.
I feel bad for not listening to this album as much as I should have when it was released. But on the flip side it's a PERFECT winter album, so the fact that I didn't really dive into it until recently has made it a lot better. La Dispute will always be amazing post-hardcore pioneers no matter what they do. Some of the old aggression is gone, sure, but much like their contemporaries in Thrice, they've replaced it with far more interesting song structures and instrumentations and melodies. The album flows seamlessly from one song to the next and it's really easy to get lost while listening to it, which is a hell of a feat given it's like a million hours long. (Okay, apparently it's only 41 minutes long, but that just shows how easy it is to get lost in it, right?) Really damn good stuff.
I was so happy when I first heard Brutus after their first LP dropped a couple years back because they combined two of my favorite genres of music: White Lung and post-hardcore. And as an added bonus, I'm pretty confident none of them are right-wing shills like White Lung's Mish Way, so you can listen guilt-free! Not only that but they feature the most unicorn of all band members: the lead vocalist woman drummer. Hell yeah! How on earth does Stefanie drum like a speeding cheetah while singing haunting melodic vocals? I have no fuckin' clue. She's a damn treasure. Point is: Brutus absolutely shreds. The music is atmospheric and powerful and melodic and I love everything about what they do and how they execute it. Playing Nest along with La Dispute's Panorama back-to-back is a really good recipe for a great winter day. It first dropped in late March when I was out in San Francisco for work and it was cold as hell and it was a perfect album to be able to listen to while walking around in that kind of weather.
It's John Darnielle singing about wizards and dragons and other legends. Do you really need to know anything more? He never disappoints.