2025: Half-Term Report
So, The Velvet Sundown, the Spotify smash, are now confirmed as an AI band. An inevitability, the endgame of the capitalist streaming model, zero cost “art” consumed by paying subscribers. All your favourite real-world artists’ creativity scraped, plagiarised even, and repackaged for the passive listener. Repulsive, of course, and yet haven’t many artists borrowed liberally from others and profited from it? Haven’t pop producers lifted guilt-free from the underground for decades?
Be appalled, but don’t pretend some big fish haven’t been profiting off the back of small fry forever. And you – the listener, the consumer – have enjoyed the results. Not one person reading this hasn’t on occasion, us included. So, is it impossible to enjoy the product of an AI artist? Morally you could choose not to if you knew, but if you didn’t? As AI progresses it’ll only get better too; it’s called machine learning. There will come a point, very soon, where you may not be able to choose because you won’t be able to tell the difference. Too dystopian for you? Then keep plugged in to resources like ours. AI would never run a site like ours; there’d be no point, and if it did it’d be too glossy to be real. True perfection must be imperfect, but crucially it must be so in the right way and, hopefully, that’ll be too difficult a lesson for AI to learn convincingly.
The fight back starts here. Our recommendations are always flawed. Ain’t no way we’re faking this. Like us, you’ll undoubtedly have had your favourites this year. Here are mine.
The latest and greatest shoegaze revival continues apace and we’re now firmly in nu-gaze and alt-gaze territory where anything vaguely woozy gets lumped in with the master term. Aficionados know the real deal though and sun-bleached, Phoenix ‘gazers Glixen duly stumble in mirage-like to the conversation, tender melodies defiled by heavy guitar noise on their sophomore EP Quiet Pleasures. Their debut LP, when it lands, promises to be blistering. Equally beguiling and in the same vein are terraplana from Brazil who nevertheless study at the DIIV school of smothering fuzz, their second album, Natural, picking killer guitar lines out of the storm.
Keeping things international, Dutch goths Rats On Rafts have a breakout record on their hands with their ear-catching fourth studio album, Deep Below. There’s no hiding their love of The Cure, but even Robert Smith would approve of their brilliant cribbing of the band’s post-punk guitar patterning. Bringing drainpipes back again, Chicago’s Lifeguard come from an altogether snappier corner of post-punk, their debut full-length, Ripped And Torn, treating The Strokes’ – and Television’s before them – swagger to a rude dose of noise that really invigorates the sound.
Brooklyn’s genuinely exciting Model/Actriz and their shapeshifting post-punk/noise debut made a real impact back in 2023 over here at [sic] towers and its follow-up, Pirouette, is just as sleazy, just as pleasingly scandalous. Rising fast doesn’t even cover the half of it! Despite the Atlantic between them, Belfast’s preposterously young Makeshift Art Bar seem to be suckling from the same teat too, their infectious and elastic post-punk grooves playing out on their debut EP as a tellingly sophisticated product way beyond the precocious band’s years.
No strangers to these pages, and keeping things noisy, The Men are up to about album number 10 and the Brooklyn veterans’ strutting punk-rock simply keeps on giving. As unpolished as ever – few bands can sculpt scuzz quite The Men – stand back and admire their work. Welsh indie-rock outfit The Tubs made quite an impression on their 2023 debut, and up the ante here on their emotional second, Cotton Crowd. Scrappy jangle-pop perfection, and all so achingly familiar, these are songs from the heart straight into your heart.
A much more refined affair, These New Puritans’ luxuriant fifth LP, Crooked Wing, is a melancholy masterpiece. Lush, textural, pensive, it references previous highwater marks without retread, Jack Barnett’s baritone as rich as it’s ever been, all combining for an album on which the Southend band sound like themselves again. Last on this list but of course not least, Irish slowcore songwriter Maria Somerville gets it all right for her 4AD debut, stepping up into an ethereal world of mature and minimal dream-pop, wispy instrumentation billowing around chilly mysticism.
List in full (no particular order):
Rats On Rafts – Deep Below (Post-Punk/Goth) [Fire Records]
Glixen – Quiet Pleasures (Shoegaze) [Wichita]
The Men – Buyer Beware (Punk/Noise-Rock) [Fuzz Club]
The Tubs – Cotton Crowd (Indie/Jangle-Pop) [Trouble In Mind]
Maria Somerville – Luster (Slowcore/Dream-Pop) [4AD]
Model/Actriz – Pirouette (Noise-Rock/Post-Punk) [True Panther/Dirty Hit]
Makeshift Art Bar – Lackluster Writing Makes Fundamental Reading (Post-Punk/Noise-Rock) [Dinked]
These New Puritans – Crooked Wing (Avant/Art-Rock) [Domino]
Lifeguard – Ripped And Torn (Garage/Post-Punk) [Matador]
terraplana – Natural (Shoegaze) [Balaclava]
Not a fan of the album format? Hear some of our tracks of the year so far too: