No Frills Reviews

13. Sam Fender People Watching

As the prestigious Mercury Music Prize stepped out of London for the first time and took the trip north to Newcastle for its annual album of the year ceremony, the 2025 crown conveniently went to local boy, Sam Fender. A fitting hometown honouring for an artist who has built his whole artistic persona around his Geordie roots. No, that’s unfair actually. He also has the whole Springsteen devotee thing going for him. With a fellow devotee on production duties for his third album, he’s now at the stage of making Springsteen-ian knockoffs of Springsteen-ian knockoffs.

Fender’s attempts at social commentary are somewhat admirable, but also over-sentimental and prone to tokenistic stereotypes. Being working-class and Geordie isn’t a personality. Although I suppose it plays well to back-patting middle-class media-types, who would otherwise view Geordies as pigeon-racing plebs. And a fanbase more concerned with having an excuse to wear their footy top in public than actually listening to more than three of your songs.

(Read our actual review)

12. Lifeguard Ripped and Torn

I’ll try to avoid lazy ‘rock is dead’ rage bait, however I will say that this is the least enthused I’ve been about rock music in about 20 years. I offer up Lifeguard as a case in point for my faltering enthusiasm. One of the buzziest bands coming out of the indie scene in 2025; a trio of fresh-faced, shaggy-haired young men from Chicago, signed to the ever-cool Matador Records, and drawing acclaim for an album of raw, intense indie rock with an experimental edge. They haven’t exactly been getting ‘saviours of rock’ level hype, but there’s talk of it being life-changing.

And . . . it’s fine, perfectly cromulent; kind of sounds like hundreds of other post-punky bands from the past 50 years . . . or the past 5 years. Most reviews opt for far cooler points of comparison, but this often just sounds like late-00’s UK indie also-rans, Pete and the Pirates (not derogatory) minus the singalong choruses (derogatory). The experimentation never feels like it involves much more than it being a bit lo-fi, and having some vaguely industrial sounds thrown in at a couple of points; it’s experimental in the sense that it’s trying to sound like experimental bands of the past. I don’t know if rock is dead, but is this what’s left? Imitations of imitations of imitations . . .

11. caroline caroline 2

The aforementioned Lifeguard may be representative of the endless revivalism of punk-indebted rock, but at least they still kinda rock. London octet, caroline, sit somewhere in the lineage of the 1970’s progressive rock movement. Nowadays, they might dress it up as post-rock (Post-Rock, noun, Definition: rock music minus fun) but it’s still the same kind of whimpering wankery that fuelled the emergence of the no-nonsense attitude of punk. And forgive me for indulging in a little (reverse) classism but this band boasts a Hugh, a Jasper, AND a Casper. Come the fuck on. Actually, if this is where rock has progressed to, then we should just put it out of its misery.

10. Greg Freeman Burnover

Following the rise of MJ Lenderman over recent years, Vermont singer-songwriter, Greg Freeman, is potentially next in line for a critical push as the cult indie-rocker of choice. Like Lenderman, Freeman deals in ramshackle alt-country storytelling (without ever really coming close to reaching the same high points). But if Lenderman’s reedy drawl wasn’t annoying enough for you, Freeman has you covered with some truly dreadful singing.

I’m very much of the opinion that any assessment of musical talent is subjective, but I’m also of the opinion that Freeman’s feeble whining is objectively fucking terrible. If 50% of your job description is ‘singer’, is it really too much to ask that you be able to sing a little bit. I’m all for unconventional voices, but this dude sounds like a caricatured teenage nerd virgin. Listen to the opening track and try telling me this isn’t some of the most embarrassing shit committed to record in 2025.

9. Earl Sweatshirt Live Laugh Love

While big brother, Tyler, has become a bona fide mainstream star, Earl Sweatshirt has steadily carved out his place as a leading light on the more experimental fringes of the rap underground. Each new project inevitably sees a flood of Twitter teenagers tripping over themselves to offer up their adulation (the ‘everyone is twelve now’ theory very much applies to the ‘me, first’ neediness of social media music fandom).

Earl is a razor-sharp writer and master of low-key, introspective slow-burners. But slow-burners is the key descriptor there. As he delivers hook-less musings in his muffled stoner drawl, I struggle to believe that this music is generating immediate excitement in anybody. Yet Earl has become a beacon for introverted hip-hop nerds who think that mild depression, and the most mundane observations thereof, are the absolute peak of artistic expression.

8. Ichiko Aoba Luminescent Creatures

You may be wondering who? Aoba isn’t exactly a household name, but I’m predicting this album will be carefully inserted on many a music connoisseurs’ year-end lists to demonstrate their deeply eclectic tastes. Luminescent Creatures is full of perfectly pleasant, but largely dull ambient folk. The kind of thing that has reviewers talking of mesmerising soundscapes and an immersive listening experience. Get a grip – it’s just the sound of some flutes, you soppy cunts.

What really gets the critics dusting off their best hyperbole is the fact that Aoba makes this music whilst also being Japanese. There’s not a chance this would be getting the same acclaim if it was in English. Stop fetishising foreign shit. Boring folk music is still boring folk music even if you don’t understand what they’re saying.

7. Folk Bitch Trio Now Would Be A Good Time

Speaking of boring folk music. These Australian newcomers make textbook boring folk music. But what sets them apart from the pack is . . .

Get this . . .

They have a swear word in their name.

The PR pitch for the trio is that, unlike those stuffy old folkies treating it all as a deathly serious concern, they’re different because they sing of cool, youthful things like being in your twenties and having sex. And, remember . . . They have a swear word in their name.

All the while, they deliver exactly the kind of music that you’d expect from stuffy old folkies treating it all deathly seriously. But, no, this ain’t your grandmother’s folk music. No, no, no. Because Folk Bitch Trio . . .

Have 👏A 👏Swear 👏Word 👏In 👏Their 👏Name👏

How subversive.

6. Smerz Big city life

Bland electro-pop from Norway for pretentious adult pop fans who can’t just admit they like Taylor Swift.

5. Big Thief Double Infinity

Big Thief and chief songwriter, Adrianne Lenker, have become one of the biggest indie institutions of the past decade. The perennial critical favourites make occasionally excellent Americana but are often prone to self-indulgent rambling. Double Infinity highlights these tendencies as they shoot for self-conscious epics with almost every track. Do they use the time to build to big climaxes or maybe throw in some bold instrumental breaks? No, not really. They just chug along, droning on way beyond the point that the songs have lost momentum, until they just kind of . . . end.

Also, they’re insufferable hippies, with pretend names like Buck, who say shit like ““two infinities… the microcosm and the macro-universe, the dichotomy we live with in every moment, knowing…” Fuck off, man.

4. Clipse Let God Sort Em Out (The Rollout)

No particular critique of Clipse as, outside of zeitgeist-jumping hyperbole in some quarters, the general consensus around the long-awaited reunion of Malice and Pusha T seemed to fairly reflect an album that is pretty good, but not great. However, their return did inspire one of the worst aspects of modern music discourse, as what really got people talking was The Rollout. Having came up when actual promotional campaigns were still the norm (and with the benefit of still having the budget to do one), the brothers embarked on an actual promotional campaign. Solid live spots on the popular platforms of the day, some good-natured chat, and a couple of minorly newsworthy quotes, throwing light shade at easy targets like Travis Scott and Ye; perfectly unremarkable stuff.

But in 2025, where much music fandom is as concerned with the music business as the music itself, a professional promotional campaign is apparently something we should care about. Blue-tick dickheads saying shit like “this Clipse rollout has been masterful/should be studied”. Thinking they sound like in-the-know PR execs, while actually sounding like boot-licking rubes, actively applauding how well a product is being sold to them. Thinking they’re influencers, when they’re in-fact industry stooges. Are you fans of music or are you fans of marketing? Celebrate the artists, not the A&R.

3. Turnstile NEVER ENOUGH

Turnstile have become the biggest hardcore band in the world by gradually becoming less of a hardcore band. The Baltimore rockers hit the sweet spot of accessibility, appealing to both trend-hopping young posers, and old dude Grammy voters desperately courting credibility with trend-hopping young posers. The hardcore band of choice for people who don’t like hardcore. And that’s not a dig at those people for not being true fans, it’s a dig at them for not having the courage in their convictions to admit that hardcore is mostly shit.

What Turnstile are really good at is creating enough space in their songs so the moments of explosive noise actually mean something rather than being lost in an overwhelming blur of nothingness. The problem being that the genre experimentation that they fill those spaces with is mostly just a bit fucking cheesy. On NEVER ENOUGH, we get the answer to ‘What if hardcore was also synth-pop, and longer?’ A question that nobody in their right mind should ever have asked, and it sounds like the kind of music that adult me would be embarrassed that teenage me listened to.

2. Maruja Pain to Power

The debut from the noisy jazz-rockers was hailed as one of the most important records of the year; a powerful protest at the state of the world. And what we get is Rage Against The Machine for the brain rot generation; edgy faux-raps delivered with all the substance of a pretentious 12-year old. I know that Rage themselves weren’t exactly subtle, but there was no denying the visceral anger in their lyrics. The writing here feels like it’s lifted straight from the pages of My First Little Angsty, Anti-Establishment Book:

“Corporations are bad” (I’m paraphrasing, but that’s about the depth of it).

“Are we all just born to die?” (no paraphrase, this is an actual line that even the cringiest teenage poet would dismiss as too obvious)

Musically; well, it’s basically post-rock (see previous definition). A tedious jam band is still a tedious jam band, even if they have a saxophone and say they’re influenced by hip-hop.

Also, I can’t take you seriously as important anti-establishment voices when you’re doing fashion photoshoots for the withering remains of the NME.

1. Geese Getting Killed

Sounds like Radiohead if they were fronted by the dude from Reef.