People Mover - Cane Trash

Baby-I’m-bored vocals, slacker rock simplicity and druggy bliss. Are Brisbane’s People Mover spearheading a dolewave revival? Because this isn’t a million miles from Dick Diver or Bitch Prefect (dolewave was great at many things, but band names not so much).

More likely, though, they’re channelling the same low-level isolation and doleful desolation as more recent American acts like Horsegirl, Snail Mail and Soccer Mommy. People Mover’s formula is pretty straightforward: strum, thrum, drum. But it’s not easy making that sound so fresh and vigorous, or making the everyday feel like something you haven’t felt before.

This is 2025’s sleeper hit. Mark my words, k records will licence it and release their second album.

Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band - New Threats from the Soul

Honky-tonk heartbreak and punch-drunk pop. The sound of summer 2025 (if you drink a lot and are emotionally unstable). If you liked Dancing On The Edge (if you didn’t, we’re not talking anymore because that’s a stone cold classic you heartless fool) then of course you’ll love this.

Bittersweet folk, unholy country and back porch blues, New Threats From The Soul really should go platinum in Nashville, Los Angeles and Stockholm. If you ever loved Bill Callahan and Will Oldham you will fall hard for this one.

Publicity Department - Old Master

Did you want an English Silver Jews? Good luck! You’re in with this immediate maudlin classic. What was that? “Like the workings of a jumbo jet, how I personally invited sex.”

Tender, passionate and quietly brutal, somewhere between James Yorkston and David Gedge. You need this album.

Rhymies - I Dream Watching

The sound of a northern English bedsit in 1981 with a cheap keyboard. Actually, no. The sound of San Francisco, 2025. Lauren Matsui of Seablite turns on the electronics and twists between glorious fatalism and fist-pumping tunes.

Yeah, there are nods to a couple of songs you likely know, but this is a first record so it leans on its influences and wears them very well. If you like, say, The Wake’s Factory output, Strawberry Switchblade and, I dunno, damn good songs then this fine, fine debut is for you.

The Pennys

There’s an idea that every indie band is a mediation of some variant of the Velvet Underground (I just made up that idea @me if you want). The Pennys take the VU variant of deadbeat crepuscular ballads, all gentle mystique, noirish glamour and intense romanticism.

This is hushed intimacy and gentle devastation. One of 2025’s great records. Like Tony Molina’s pocket symphonies finding Opal’s back catalogue. If I were 16 I’d be stalking them. Or writing their name on my school desk after being turned away from the tattoo parlour.

mariin k. - Rose Skin

In which mariin k. makes a correction to the idea that the Estonian shoegaze scene is insular by finding fresh ways to create an immediate classic of punchy riffs and melodic gauze.

mariin k. exists in a booming contemporary scene, and Rose Skin has a rich history behind it and a bright future ahead. “Essential” barely covers it.

Sharp Pins - Radio DDR

There’s an idea that every record in the DIY genre is really in the Guided By Voices genre. I get that, and I especially get it when Radio DDR could fit in to GBV’s mid-90s imperial period of pop, psych and punk.

Make no mistake, this album is all crashing guitars, clanging melodies and sweet, sweet tunes but it’s its own thing. The recording budget might not stretch to more than a cheap night out, but this is the sound of drinking cans of beer on the hood of a car with the cool kids while everyone you never liked went to prom night.

And? And it’s the sound of loneliness after getting dumped. And? It’s my favourite album of the year. Probably.