Ben Kweller is a few months older than me, and when we were both 15 and I was playing in my first garage band, I'd see him on MTV News and "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" with his band Radish. After Kweller went solo, I saw him play a great show with Brendan Benson at a bar in Baltimore when he was 21 (I was 20, so security put the Sharpie X's on my hands). I wouldn't say I've followed his career too closely over the years, "Falling" was always the one song I'd come back to now and then, love that one. But I always liked and related to Kweller, and my heart broke hearing about his teenage son Dorian dying in a car accident a couple years ago. Cover the Mirrors is Kweller's first album since that tragedy, and I was holding it together through most of the album, but man, that closing track "Oh Dorian" really made me cry. Kweller's voice is eternally boyish even now in his forties and still makes crisp, catchy pop/rock, so there's this sort of indefatigable sweetness to the album, even when he's singing about depression and going through something absolutely awful. This is in my 2025 albums Spotify playlist along with the other albums in this post. 

I was a little less enthusiastic about Heaven Knows than To Hell With It, so I started to think that maybe PinkPantheress was one of those artists that just had this very narrow lane and once you get used to what they do, they get less interesting with each release. But Fancy That might be my favorite project from her to date, she's subtly expanding the variety of sounds and styles in her tracks without losing her main signatures (the brevity, that voice that sounds like nobody else). My favorite tracks are probably the three at the end, all in a row, great run. 

I had a lot of fun ranking the Sparks catalog a few weeks ago and really finally taking in the size and variety of their output, almost 30 albums over the last 54 years. I found that I have something of a preference towards their more band-oriented music and their more deadpan humor, and a lot of MAD! is just the Mael brothers with Russell delivering the lyrics with an audible smirk. So I didn't take to it as immediately as some of their other albums, but I really like "Hit Me, Baby" and "A Little Bit of Light Banter." 

Aoife O'Donovan made one of my favorite albums of 2022 and Sarah Jarosz made one of my favorite albums of 2024, but I wasn't really that familiar with their careers before that and didn't realize they were also in a group together with Sara Watkins of Nickel Creek that released an album in 2018. I'm With Her feels like kind of a 2010s cliche kind of name at this point that just reminds me of the Hillary Clinton campaign, but whatever, I love hearing these three voices together, they're a soft rock supergroup much more up my alley than Boygenius. 

Maddie & Tae's first two albums each had a #1 country radio hit, one of them being 2014's "Girl In A Country Song," which skewered the overwhelmingly male perspective of mainstream country at the time. A decade later, there are even fewer women on country radio, and Maddie & Tae's latest album and all its singles have failed to chart. And that's really frustrating, because Maddie Font and Taylor Kerr have become really consistent, clever songwriters and there are so many songs that could be hits on here, particularly "Drunk Girls In Bathrooms." 

Maren Morris has had some crossover success with "The Middle" with Zedd and the version of "Bones" with Hozier, but she didn't so much go pop with her fourth major label album as she pointedly left the country music industry. She took a stand for left wing causes like trans rights, called out problematic country superstars like Jason Aldean and Morgan Wallen, divorced her D-list country singer husband, and came out as bisexual. And here's another case of an artist I really like making a record that completely missed the Billboard 200, even though Dreamsicle is packed with excellent songs made with Top 40 hitmaker types like Jack Antonoff, Greg Kurstin, Joel Little, and Julia Michaels. "Push Me Over" should've been a single, that's the one that really stood out to me, both here and on last year's Intermission EP. I really like the piano ballad "Carry Me Through" too, I could go for a whole record that sounds like that. 

Eric Church's latest album did chart, but it peaked lower on the Billboard 200 than any of his other studio albums, even the first two from before he really became a hitmaker. That's not totally surprising given that this is one of the riskier albums from one of contemporary mainstream country's biggest risk takers, but I guess it really shows that his guest appearances on the last two Morgan Wallen albums didn't provide any kind of boost to his career. Evangeline vs. The Machine is full of string and brass arrangements that are a big departure from the sound of every previous Church album, and it ends with a cover of "Clap Hands" by Tom Waits. And I like all of that more in theory than in practice, sometimes the orchestrations really overwhelm the songs, and I don't think his version of one of my favorite Waits songs is particularly good. Still, last year's charity single "Darkest Hour" is a great song and I also really like "Rocket's White Lincoln," it's an interesting new chapter to a great catalog. 

There's a lot of inoffensive, well-meaning indie rock that I could snark about but choose not to, they usually seem like nice people with good politics and cool influences and the respect of many of my music critic peers. Now and then a record will get on my nerves, though. A radio station I listen to, WTMD, has played two songs from Blondshell's second album a lot in the last few months, "What's Fair" and "23's A Baby." I really just do not like her bored-sounding voice, and checking out the entire album didn't improve my opinion much. The latter song just irritates me so much, it sounds like a 28-year-old woman acting completely perplexed or annoyed that another woman became a mother at 23, that whole thing these days of adults infantilizing other adults or acting like someone is practically a teen mom if they have kids in their twenties.