Our Top 10 Lists have been named in honor of late Blog Director and DJ Clarence Ewing, who pioneered and published this annual feature for nearly a decade.
Our next list is from Elisabeth Oster.
10. 1985: The Miracle Year by Hüsker Dü (Numero Group)
Rarely is a live recording as good as its produced counterpart in terms of listening experience. But for the underground grunge of Hüsker Dü, hearing Numero's beautifully packaged live encapsulation feels like hearing these songs as they were meant to be for the first time. Falling prey to overly polished 80s production, the frenetic energy of Minneapolis' legendary punk scene—housed in the warmth of First Avenue and The Longhorn, and catapulted by legendary rock bands like The Replacements and The Suburbs—was largely flattened and toned down in an attempt to make catchy label fodder, rather than capture a deeply local hardcore-adjacent movement. Largely taken from a Hüsker Dü's First Avenue 1985 live show and their ensuing scrappy tour run, minor radio hits turn into throbbing, dimensional tracks of heartbreak. In 2025, re-examined Hüsker Dü gets to be loud, as it should be.
Listen: Bandcamp
9. Balloon Balloon Balloon by Sharp Pins (K Recs / Perennial)
Balloon Balloon Balloon is an ornate time machine shot straight from the '60s and delivered earnestly via 21-year-old Kai Slater. Across a whopping (but snappy) 21 tracks, the lo-fi sensibilities of bedroom pop meet sun-drenched British invasion. And with its muddied jangly guitars and its fizzy drumbeats, you'd be hard pressed to convince a casual listener that this album came out any time recently. Following the album Radio DDR, Balloon Balloon Balloon is the second effort from Sharp Pins this year, and is 10 times dreamier, reverbed, and acidically psychedelic.
Listen: Bandcamp
8. Ditch Me by Matching Outfits (Bar/None)
If Belle and Sebastian’s lead singer were Velvet Underground songstress Nico, the result would be Matching Outfits’ Ditch Me. Never has a breakup album been so playful and deeply relatable, from overanalyzing birthday well wishes to wasted concert tickets for two, Ditch Me is an extended gossip session between friends that flicks between communal spite and therapeutic affirmation. Finding humor in pain and bolstered by steady tambourines and driving melodies, this album’s distinctive personality provides comfort for the minor and major of life circumstances, because after all, “A heartbreak is just a hangover of the heart.”
Listen: Bandcamp
7. Phonetics On and On by Horsegirl (Matador)
In its hypnotic rhythms and its tender "da-da-da"s lies one of the most exciting releases of the year. Chicago's own indie rock trio, Horsegirl, fills their second album with pulsing textures via call-and-response vocals, overlapping verses, and catchy incantations. Each track has the makings for catchy pop hooks, but with each turn, Horsegirl subverts song structure. Stylistically, the album makes big choices that pay off—like the haunting violin additions in “2468,” played like a wailing guitar. The 3-minute track is structured to steadily build, eventually erupting into a satisfying sonic collage that you could simultaneously dance or meditate to.
Listen: Bandcamp
6. Run to the Center by Cornelia Murr (22TWENTY)
For the past seven years, Cornelia Murr has reliably produced aural landscapes to wrap yourself in. Part textural spacey synth and part dreamy folk serenader, the magic falls to Murr's breathy vocals, feeling as if they could shatter with the smallest interruption of its musical bewitching. Case in point: When opening for French disco duo Papooz at Lincoln Hall this past spring, you could hear a pin drop when Murr went to work weaving her spell. From the synth jams of "How Do You Get By" to the addictive melodies of standout closer "Bless Yr Lil Heart," this latest effort delivers ten cotton-candied tracks that float and glide by with dream pop excellence.
Listen: Bandcamp
5. I Hope We Can Still Be Friends by Dean Johnson (Saddle Creek)
A late-in-life realized troubadour, Dean Johnson's silky, sinewy voice takes on songs made for wandering on empty highways and driving into the sunset. Amidst the backdrop of honeyed backing vocals, delicate guitar strums, and lyrical styling akin to Townes Van Zandt, Johnson weaves warmth into each Americana twang, solidifying this album as one to return to for comfort and warmth. Before putting out his debut at 50 years old, Johnson spent much of his life bartending in the thick of Seattle rain. Just like a perceptive bartender, I Hope We Can Still Be Friends feels like shelter from an outside world, introducing the listener to a patchwork of characters—each song an encounter of perfect strangers, temptresses named Carol, and past lovers. But at the end of the day, it's Johnson's voice that makes each encounter utterly beautiful; his high-pitched warbles are arresting at every turn.
LIsten: Bandcamp
4. What Of Our Nature by Haley Heyndrickx and Max García Conover (Fat Possum)
Folk protest music is back, and this recent dual effort from Haley Heynderickx and Max García Conover proves to be one of the most striking and sorrowful exercises of political music in recent memory. It's filled with prescient warnings on internet marketing, labor systems, and a chilling ode to control of the world's fluorescent lights—the lights of dismal corporate offices, the flickers of cold prisons, and the burning images of phone screens. In their second album collaboration, Heynderickx and Conover alternate between each other's lyrical storytelling and who puts truth to vocals. As much as each track warns of what's to come, it also aims to educate on the overlooked histories and ancestral injustices that echo and reverberate, whether detailing the imprisonment of Puerto Rican independence activist Alicia Rodríguez or revitalizing poetry from Filipino-American labor activist Carlos Bulosan. As disturbing as the truths revealed, the comfort of warm guitar instrumentations and soft, well-worn vocals balance the sharp incisiveness of its lyrical critique of modern times.
Listen: Bandcamp
3. Getting Killed by Geese (Partisan Recorsd / Play It Again Sam)
A lot has been made of the overwhelming spectacle of Brooklyn band Geese's sudden breakthrough frenzy, and its elusive, shaggy frontman Cameron Winter. Talk of "sailor in a big green coat" Halloween costumes and rumblings of the next Bob Dylan meteoric rise, á la sold-out Carnegie Hall show. Of course, the fragmented discourse is certainly for good reason. The seamless duality between the quiet hesitancy of each verse on Winter's solo album versus the swaggering confidence of the frontman's Jim Morrison-esque delivery on Geese's Getting Killed is a sight to behold. Lyrically dense with glittering guitars and satisfyingly belted choruses, it has the DNA of classic rock royalty, but tests the boundaries at each beat and rhythmic shift—notes are held just a little longer, the beat's slowed down slightly, and each cathartic song climax ends as abruptly as it started. Perhaps the most fascinating part of the Geese phenomenon is how popular a largely inaccessible album has become. Not even a minute into the album, there's guttural, abrupt yells: "THERE'S A BOMB IN MY CAR," Winter screams. It's these dramatic, weird gambles that make for the most memorable release of a year, heartened by an unexpected mainstream embrace.
Listen: Bandcamp
2. It's Summer, I Love You, and I'm Surrounded by Snow by Dead Gowns (Mtn Laurel Recording Co.)
“I need to see people / To sound like myself,” drawls Geneviève Beaudoin on the track "See People." Under the moniker Dead Gowns, Beaudoin puts out a gorgeous output of raging folk rock that explores human connection in all its facets—familial, romantic, or imagined—as an apt response of desperation for touch and feeling in a post-2020-COVID world. Toeing the line between yodels and yells, each song's vocal stylings present as a yearning folk rock cowgirl, spun through steel pedals and gravelly guitars. The album's melodic pining feels profound with its observational lyrical style, and even more so as Beaudoin flits from English to French and whispers to belts. "How Can I" in particular sticks to your bones, simmers in its heartbreak, and cements It’s Summer, I Love You, and I’m Surrounded by Snow as the most poetic release of the year.
Listen: Bandcamp
1. Bleeds by Wednesday (Dead Oceans)
As the title suggests, this album bleeds. The wounds are deep here, bleeding out emotion, laid bare in all its guts and grit. No other album ruined me more, and I loved every second of it. It's predominantly a record of small-town claustrophobia and being stuck in its dark, gritty corners. Effortlessly flicking between channels of country rock, shoegaze, and outlaw ballad, Bleeds' fluidity across its moments of quiet and noise keeps the heart pumping. And at its heart is the tender rework of "That's the Way Love Goes," first popularized by Merle Haggard. The melody is familiar, and so is its general messaging towards the highs and lows of a relationship, but the lyrics are a departure, rewritten to be personal to lead singer Hartman's own relationship's rises and falls. More specifically, the song references her relationship with fellow alt-country phenom and bandmate MJ Lenderman. The result is a love song written within the walls of an established relationship, and recorded once the walls crumbled. It’s a strikingly vulnerable recording that’s a testament to taking something withered and dead and channeling it into something alive and new, into art for a garden of fellow heartbroken sufferers.
Listen: Bandcamp