Swim Into The Sound's Staff Favorites of 2025

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It’s hard for me to talk about The Swim Team and not sound like a proud dad, but it’s true! I’m immensely proud of our writers because they’re the ones who make this site what it is. Sure, I’m the bozo editing stuff and hitting “post,” but they’re the ones doing the hard work pouring their hearts out onto the page. They’re the ones steering this site’s taste and dictating the culture of Swim Into The Sound. 

Through this multitude of perspectives, we’ve assembled what I believe to be the coolest and most talented bunch of music nerds this side of the internet. The wild part is this isn’t just a relationship cultivated through Google Docs, DMs, emails, and Discord. Throughout the year, I’ve had the distinct pleasure of meeting many of these people in real life, grabbing a beer or catching a show with them, and talking endlessly about the music that moves us. Surprising no one, they’re just as cool in real life as they are on the page. 

It’s a joy to know these folks, and I consider myself lucky as hell to have them as part of my life and part of this website. Their words, verve, and taste have helped me sharpen my own versions of those things. If that’s too lofty, the recommendations I’ve received from them have been enough to fill my playlists and music queue all year, and that alone is a gift. Today, I share that same gift with you in the form of our team’s favorite albums of the year. What follows are 20 recommendations from 20 different writers, all going to bat for their favorite record of 2025—a diverse spread of music straight from the heart, not the algorithm. As usual, I hope you discover something new and exciting to love; I know I definitely have.

– Taylor

David Williams | Hotline TNT – Raspberry Moon

Third Man Records

A couple of metrics for how I choose my record for the year: What’s the first album that pops to my mind when I recommend music? What album can I spin that instantly gives me that ever-elusive nostalgia fix? What can I listen to constantly without ever growing weary? Raspberry Moon by Hotline TNT checks all these boxes for me this year. Will Anderson has transformed his one-man show into a well-oiled, merciless rock machine by integrating a full band during the writing and recording process for the first time in the band’s history. Everything is grander in scale, from the anthem-level hooks in “Julia’s War” to the blown-out guitar riffs on “Where U Been?” I’ve seen Hotline TNT perform the album live on multiple occasions, and the collective unit plays the songs so muscularly that even Arnold Schwarzenegger would blush.

Raspberry Moon is a gigantic step taken with full force that feels like a band discovering their newfound powers. “The Scene” is a Scud missile of a jam that would fit in on the soundtrack to any Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater game. “Candle” is a power-pop flame hit that will never extinguish. Every song on Raspberry Moon deserves to be played at the highest decibel possible, and when the cops start thunderously banging on your door, they’ll understand why once they hear what’s coming through your speakers.

David’s Other 2025 Favorites:

  • Clipse - Let God Sort Em Out

  • Wednesday - Bleeds

  • The Tubs - Cotton Crown

  • Water From Your Eyes - It’s A Beautiful Place

  • Total Wife - come back down


Caro Alt | Colin Miller – Losin’

Mtn Laurel Recording Co.

After years and years of homesickness, I finally moved back to the South over the summer. I made jokes about how I couldn’t take another winter in a place where it snowed, but I really just missed it here. I made my decision to finally return while walking around Georgia in the aftermath of the winter and listening to Losin’ by Colin Miller for the first time. (I also reviewed it here.) Since that day, I’ve spent the entire year listening to that soft, barely-there delivery of Miller’s, replaying his warped guitars, and feeling the phantom misery he writes about while in the driver’s seat of his car. Spinning his wheels, getting upset in a drive-thru, racing on the highway, picking you up from jail. Sputtering engines, rusting hoods, and watching for headlights. I love this album because it is full of songs about cars that are not actually about cars and songs not about cars that are actually about cars. If you give it a spin, do it while going home, I know I did.

Other Albums I Loved:


Ben Parker | Arm’s Length – There’s A Whole World Out There

Pure Noise Records

This has been a year of change for me. I have gotten back into shape, I traveled across the country, and I saw Arm’s Length three different times. Now, the biggest change awaits as I sit here, staring down a potential job change that will see me move out of Indiana for the first time to a city I have only been to once. In all of this, I find myself connecting to one line in “The Wound” by Arm’s Length where singer Allen Steinberg leads into the hook yelling out, “I’ve spent a lifetime longing to leave, how the fuck could I stay?”

Every single track on There’s A Whole World Out There features some lyric that translates to an actual thought, experience, or feeling that I have had. It makes me feel profoundly human, as I have spent my whole life giving myself to everyone and hardly ever asking for anything in return, beyond the slightest sliver of kindness. I hear the line “When you’re constantly talking sweet / I don’t trust the words / but I don’t really care cause none of them hurt,” and I can’t help but think of the moments I have shared with friends and lovers long past the lifespan of the relationship, when we just said things out of habit. 

Despite the strong, sad themes throughout Arm’s Length’s sophomore album, there is still something inherently hopeful about it. Their debut, 2022’s Never Before Seen, Never Again Found, showcased the ways that childhood trauma can affect someone for their entire life and create a cycle of violence. In contrast, There’s A Whole World Out There has the same sadness and pain woven into its DNA, but shows that, despite it all, you move forward. 

Every person on this planet will live a life, and in that time, we will experience the full breadth of human emotion, and at the end of it all, we will die the same. To some people, this creates a sense of hopelessness, knowing there is nothing you can do to change your fate, and maybe that’s true, but change comes, and it’s worth experiencing. With this album, I have looked my mortality in the eyes and shook its hand, knowing that, just as the final line of the album says, “On any day I may pass, in any way I am killed.”

Other Favorites of 2025:

  1. Infinity Guise - Summerbruise

  2. Reasons I Won’t Change - Tiny Voices

  3. I Don’t Want To See You In Heaven - The Callous Daoboys

  4. Pleaser - Pretty Bitter

  5. Blame It On the Weather - Kerosene Heights


Cassidy Sollazzo | Folk Bitch Trio – Now Would Be A Good Time

Jagjaguwar

“Am I lucky, or am I just sane?” Heide Peverelle asks on the opening track of Folk Bitch Trio’s debut album. I’ve been keyed into the Melbourne three-piece for a few years, surviving only off a few singles (“Analogue” is forever an all-timer) and the hope that an LP was in the works. In 2025, I got my wish. Now Would Be A Good Time is an evocative, stirring collection of songs written over the formative late-teens-to-early-20s years, yet delivered with a confidence and cohesion beyond their years. Peverelle, Jeanie Pilkington, and Gracie Sinclair are more locked-in than ever, each with their definitive voices, roles, and songwriting qualities. The album’s blunt and crass in some moments (“Had a filthy dream to the noise of the hotel TV” or the cutting “Say you wanna get sober, I say I’d like to see you try”), tear-jerking in others (“Moth Song” wrecks me, personally), always delivered with a Mitchellian chord progression and a knowing wink. I’ve seen the group twice since the album dropped in July, once during release week at Nightclub 101, then a few months later at Baby’s All Right on their North American tour (it should be a testament to my love for them that I set foot in Baby’s, my least favorite venue in all of Brooklyn). There is a literal magic that moves through the room during their sets, each of them captivating in their own way. I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again: not since Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young have we seen harmonies this crisp! Gives me chills!

I wrote more about the Trio and their album for Paste over the summer, if you are so inclined to go deeper on this group. We talked about their recording and songwriting processes, how their friendships play into their group dynamics, and how they’ve been taking to their newfound exposure. 2026 is looking big for them: Kilby Block Party, arena openings for Mumford & Sons, and King Gizzard’s Field of Vision II. Hopefully, you can say you heard it here first! 

Some more favs:

  1. The Rubber Teeth Talk - Daisy the Great

  2. Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory - Sharon Van Etten

  3. In Space - Edith Frost

  4. Cuntry - Cleo Reed

  5. Melt - Not For Radio


Britta Joseph | Pile – Sunshine and Balance Beams

Sooper Records

During one of the many conversations about music I had with my friends this year, the question “Where are all the riffs?” was posed. My immediate answer was, “They’re all on the Pile album.” I stand firmly by my assertion, because Sunshine and Balance Beams is a rager of a release. It’s made for screaming along to: each track a torrent of righteous anger and ethereal beauty, every cutting lyric and brittle snare hit landing exactly where they’re intended to.

The band dissects the cult dynamics of hypercapitalism as though they’re performing vivisection, laying bare the sinister implications of the reality we inhabit. As someone who’s survived severe childhood trauma and spent several years in a religious cult, I cherish Pile’s bold confrontation and thunderous rage against evil in modern society. (If you want to read more about how this album ties into my childhood experiences, I reviewed it in full here.)

Not only is the album’s message necessary and impactful, but the sheer magnitude of the intensely beautiful arrangements, scintillating production, and dense instrumentation has to be experienced to be believed. Frontman Rick Maguire is at his very best, screaming one moment and crooning the next: every song feels like he’s singing it specifically to you. And you know what? Maybe he is.

Five selections from my list of favorites this year:

  • The Spiritual Sound - Agriculture

  • thank god for you - Melancholy Club

  • Don’t Trust Mirrors - Kelly Moran

  • this is my outside voice - satsuma 

  • Catcher - siichaq


Ben Sooy | Flock of Dimes – The Life You Save

Sub Pop

Jenn Wasner has lived large in my musical life for years. I have an instinctual longing to listen to her band Wye Oak (especially their third album, Civilian) every autumn when the air gets frosty and my body pushes me outside to walk, smoke cigarettes, and stare off into the distance. Look at that bird, the leaves are changing, isn’t life just one cycle of life and death dancing all with each other all the time?

Jenn Wasner’s solo project, Flock of Dimes, is having a big year. She had a vocal feature with Dijon on Bon Iver’s SABLE,fABLE (she’s buddies with Justin Vernon, who, a couple of years ago, invited her to be a member of the Bon Iver touring band). The Bon Iver song is great, but her 2025 solo record, The Life You Save, is better. 

Wasner wrote an album about trying to love people who struggle deeply with real shit: addiction, codependency, poverty, etc. Through the arc of the record, you see Wasner struggle to try and save others, but she realizes she’s incapable of even saving herself. There are depths there underneath some very catchy tunes, inspired production, and beautiful vocal performances!

Honorable Mentions:


Lillian Weber | Total Wife – come back down

Julia’s War Recordings

I am permanently in my head about everything. About what other people are thinking, about what I’ve done, about what comes next. My thoughts are a perpetual whirlpool that has no bottom, just a constant downward spiral. But come back down by Total Wife has been an anchor. When I have the record blaring in my headphones, I sink to the bottom of the ocean of my thoughts. I drift down through chopped beats, smeared guitars, and cooed laments to hopes and dreams unfulfilled. From the moment I hear the first notes of “in my head,” I am relieved. Every second after is a warm embrace of understanding. But relief isn’t the only thing this record makes me feel, because this record has “make it last,” and that song doesn’t make me feel relieved – it makes me ecstatic. “make it last” is the air in my lungs and leaves me washed up on a beach gasping for breath. Listening to “make it last,” the euphoric rush of that feedback-drenched chorus hitting my eardrums at full volume, is the best feeling in the world.

Honorable mentions:

  • Lotto by They Are Gutting A Body of Water 

  • Gaman by Star 99

  • Times Up by Bootcamp

  • The Spiritual Sound by Agriculture


David Gay | Sharon Van Etten – Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory 

Jagjaguwar

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of jam bands, from Phish (the best band) to others like Eggy, Goose, and Taper’s Choice. There’s something magical that happens when a group of people let the music take them to an unexpected place, somewhere they may not have gone to in an orchestrated piece. 

In mid-September, Sharon Van Etten and her band, the Attachment Theory, performed at the Hi-Fi Annex in Indianapolis. At one point between songs, she said, “I’m in my 40s, and I finally learned how to jam,” and I realized that I was seeing her grow musically with the help of others, a band. 

After first hearing the rolling bass lines that calls back to 80s bands like New Order on “Idiot Box” to the full-band groove that permeates “Afterlife” and “Somethin’ Ain’t Right,” I immediately knew that Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory was going to be one of my favorite albums of 2025 and that I was going to see Sharon Van Etten in a new way from now on. This is something that was affirmed during her live show, while I was in the midst of a full-blown outdoor dance party, including folks of all ages. 

While the Attachment Theory isn’t a jam band in the traditional sense, it embraces what is so great about that kind of music – the importance of going with the flow and being willing to collaborate with other talented musicians to find a new kind of sound, arriving at something that hasn’t been explored before. This is why it’s one of my favorite albums of the year. 

Other favorite things from 2025: 


Elias Amini | Marasme – Fel

Discos Macarras

There’s been some discussion within the Swim Team about the difference between a “Best of” list and a “Favorites” list. Try as we might, the objective and subjective can blur all too easily. One of my favorite albums of the year, however, sits quite comfortably in that blur. Marasme’s aural black metal groovefest Fel is the band’s latest work, the fourth album to be released in their almost 20-year existence as a group, and the experience shows. Six pummeling, winding, groovy, and at times avant-garde tracks all build and flow into a relentlessly excellent listening experience. I couldn’t tell you that this was my favorite project I’d heard all year. But I can tell you that I loved listening to it when I was between other albums. I imagine some time in the future I may smack my forehead and realize that this was in fact my favorite album of 2025. For now though, I don’t feel the need to lay some exalted crown on this album, only to tell you that it’s a great, enjoyable record and heavy music fans will definitely find themselves coming back to it for more.

Some other records I loved:

  • Massa Nera - The Emptiness of All Things

  • Ninajirachi - I Love My Computer

  • Chevalier - Un dolore a cui non so dare nome

  • Shlohmo - Repulsor

  • Blue Earth Sound - Cicero Nights


Kirby Kluth | Fust – Big Ugly

Dear Life Records

Fust’s Big Ugly feels like an inside joke or a perfect memory from childhood, the kind where you still feel the warm wind blowing against you while all of your favorite people are in sight right there before you. I wrote about Big Ugly in our Q1 roundup because it reminded me of all the ways you can find beauty in The South. A couple of weeks later, Fust played the best show I’ve ever been to at my local venue, the Pilot Light. That little one-two-punch solidified my allegiance, and I’ve been calling Fust “the best band in America” ever since. 

My daughter just turned one, and she has been mimicking my wife and I for some time now. I have gotten her to copy me whistling, and she pretty often catches the right spot to make a true tune. I've been whistling and humming “Sister,” “Bleached,” “What’s His Name,” and “Heart Song” around her for months now, and I hope that someday soon she’ll be whistling a Fust song right back to me. 

2025, according to Kirby:


Noëlle Midnight | Blackbraid – Blackbraid III

Self-released

It’s hard to write about a record when the main thing you want to say is that it’s got really good riffs, but that’s where I find myself with indigenous black metal band Blackbraid’s aptly titled third LP: Blackbraid III. Opening with the sounds of a fire in the woods, an acoustic guitar comes in, setting the scene as night falls, and you are transported into the image depicted on the album art. It’s soft and gentle. Safe.

And then the riffs come in. 

Massive blast beats paired with 16th note riffs immediately tell you what type of record you’re in for, as “Wardrums at Dawn on the Day of my Death” comes on and blasts your ass off. For the next 53 minutes, that’s what you’re in for: acoustic sweetness pulling you into the scene, alternating with black metal speed applied to thrash metal riffs, dragging you through lyrics that tell of a “warrior’s fate to ride the storm.” The album takes the established world and places characters in it, embedded in tales of war and honor, as they are “haunted by memories” in the light of the moon. The imagery is just badass. You feel like you’re watching an epic adventure film where anything could happen. Plus, the riffs are so sick.

Noëlle’s Other Favorites from 2025:

  • Lucy Dacus - Forever is a Feeling

  • Turnstile - NEVER ENOUGH

  • Silverstein - Antibloom

  • Petey USA - The Yips

  • Sierra Hull - A Tip Toe High Wire


Nick Webber | Adrianne Lenker – Live at Revolution Hall

4AD

I’ve never been big on live albums, so I was surprised to come to the realization that Live at Revolution Hall is not just my favorite record of the year, but probably my favorite project in the Adrianne Lenker/Big Thief canon. Recorded over three nights on reel-to-reel and cassette tape by longtime friend of Lenker’s (and one of my favorite working producers) Andrew Sarlo, the experience is far from your standard glorified soundboard rip and might best be described as a cinematic sonic documentary. Selected performances across Lenker’s oeuvre were stitched together in editing via snippets of backstage takes, soundchecks, and field recordings in a sort of mad-scientist fashion, an approach perfectly suited for the songwriter’s singular balance of timelessness and ingenuity. Fans leave messages for Adrianne on a tape recorder, poetry is recited in the parking lot, a guy who can’t stop sneezing is blessed mid-song, one reel of tape runs out and the fidelity changes dramatically right as the next verse hits. The result has the captivating effect of an augmented reality personal concert, a masterfully curated interflow of play and reverence that could only come from deep trust and understanding.

My wife and I caught Lenker on tour when she came through Denver, for a seated show, and the most spellbound, pin-drop-quiet crowd I’ve been part of since seeing Julien Baker in 2017. Lenker was firing on all cylinders, equal parts commanding and meek, her fingerstyle guitar prowess and emotional directness undeniable, somehow making a sold-out room of nearly 4,000 feel intimate. Captured from various perspectives in Live at Revolution Hall, the audience functioned like an instrument of its own, participating at appropriate moments in ways that were hearteningly human and bracingly normal (a 2025 live music miracle). I think this album is as close as anyone’s come to bottling that rare collective effervescence, the feeling of existing in time and space at a once-in-a-lifetime show and realizing that you’re a part of something special: a true feat, and one that might cement this album as the definitive portrait of a generational talent’s career just over a decade in.

Also loved:

  • Florist - Jellywish 

  • Great Grandpa - Patience Moonbeam

  • Seer Believer - Make a Wish

  • Kitchen - Blue heeler in ugly snowlight, grey on gray on grey on white.

  • Ólafur Arnalds and Talos - A Dawning


Caleb Doyle | Samia – Bloodless

Grand Jury Music

Samia Finnerty cannot make a bad song.

From moments of minimalism that grow into genuine sonic excess, to melodic and impressionistic lyrics, Bloodless is cohesive and surprising, and begs multiple immediate relistens.

The lead single “Bovine Excision” and the title of the album refer to a creepy, decades-old conspiracy theory about livestock being mysteriously drained of their blood and relieved of their organs. Here, Samia’s reference is in yearning—a wish to be weightless, bloodless, and unattainable. Unflappable and unshakeable, although maybe also lifeless. The kinds of lyrics that leave a pit in one’s stomach, and they’re just the tip of the iceberg on Bloodless. 

The entire album is an exercise in dynamics, and the music mirrors the themes with growing and shrinking, waxing and waning. A song about something as mundane as a pair of pants spins up into a profound introspective moment—laying bare womanhood and society’s expectations, carried by a repeated refrain, “Wanna see what’s under these Levi’s? I got nothin’ under these Levi’s.” Just like the lyrics, the music swells and dissipates, over and over, throughout the whole record. It’s like the whole thing is breathing, sometimes slowly and measured, other times laboring under duress.

With Jake Luppen of Hippo Campus at the helm on production, the sounds of this record are both tight and exploratory. From more traditional Saddest Factory-coded indie ballads like “Fair Game,” to the big distorted Snail Mail-esque guitars on “North Poles” and “Carousel,” Bloodless feels right at home with today’s indie pop landscape, but what sets it apart is Samia’s genius songwriting and her breathy soprano voice that is more powerful than expected.

The songs are just beautiful. The music is a tapestry, and Samia’s melodies feel completely timeless. There’s a certain eeriness that runs throughout the album—from the interstitial radio static to Samia’s sometimes-haunting voice, and that eeriness sets Bloodless apart from Samia’s peers. You might get away with playing this over the speakers of your bespoke dress shop, but someone is going to get caught staring out of a window for too long.

Bloodless solidifies Samia as an artist who can pull away from the pack and create an album that walks the tightrope of haunting and gorgeous, as unsettling as it is reassuring.

The rest of my Top 5:
2. Tobacco City - Horses
3. Racing Mount Pleasant - S/T
4. Hannah Cohen - Earthstar Mountain
5. Annie DiRusso - Super Pedestrian


Jason Sloan | Real Lies – We Will Annihilate Our Enemies

TONAL Recordings

Let’s set the scene. You’re six drinks deep at the club, hands in the air, lover by your side, drugs about to kick in, when suddenly your phone receives a push notification heralding the imminent end of the world. Do you fall into a deep despair, or do you simply have to laugh at the absurdity? Real Lies’ scintillating We Will Annihilate Our Enemies is the sound of the decision to leave it all on the dance floor while the world crumbles around you.

As our devices moderate increasing swaths of modern life, art must contend with the uncanny valley. How does one expound upon an existence ever more fenced in by the digital boxes in our pockets? Real Lies wring surprising pathos out of their Extremely Online tales of E-Girls and Twitter fascists, of billboard ads and Strava stats. The world would be less lonely if we could just agree to boogie through the horrors together. 

The other album I considered here: Elm - Elm EP


Logan Archer Mounts | The Mountain Goats – Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan

Cadmean Dawn

No surprises, no teases, no left-field underground international death metal, this is just me talking about my favorite band (other than KISS and a few others, depending on the day) who put out the best hour of music that 2025 had to offer. 

The Mountain Goats changed my life after I saw them for the first time in 2009, and ever since then, a new album of theirs usually finds itself in my top ten at the end of the year — but never number one, until now. With Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan, their first album on their own label and first since the departure of longtime bassist Peter Hughes, bandleader John Darnielle’s storytelling and composition reach a creative peak that echoes the Goats’ more grandiose albums like Goths or In League With Dragons, but delivered with even more advanced theatrics. That’s literal theatrics too, with vocal contributions from, no kidding, Lin-Manuel Miranda. It feels like the project Darnielle has been working towards his entire career, the closest to his fabled Riversend musical that has appeared in portions on previous albums. …Peter Balkan is a defining moment for The Mountain Goats, genuine and gorgeous, and a perfect start to the band’s next chapter.

Further recommended audio from God’s strongest survivors of the hellscape:
•Craig Finn, Always Been – my other favorite songwriter
•Guided By Voices, Thick Rich And Delicious – my other, other favorite songwriter
•Bodybox, 3 – my new favorite pro-meth slam metal band


Ciara Rhiannon | Jason Isbell – Foxes in the Snow

Southeastern Records

My album of the year might seem like a no-brainer to those who know how many of my favorite bands had stellar releases across 2025, yet one record managed to sneak past the front-runners and stick with me throughout the entire year. Jason Isbell’s Foxes in the Snow is a heartwrenching and intimate first-person account of his recent divorce, his journey of introspection, and, ultimately, of finding love again without even looking for it. 

Foxes in the Snow was recorded over five days at Electric Lady Studios in New York, just one man and an almost-century-old acoustic guitar. I suppose therein lies the magic that drew me to this album – there’s no hiding in any of it. The lyrical context of the record is so raw, so gutting, so honest, I can’t imagine any other way of delivering such an experience. When you listen to this record with headphones (which I highly recommend, especially on the first listen), you can even more intensely absorb Isbell’s guitar pick scraping along the strings of the old Martin guitar, every subtle movement, every little blemish of the recording process amplifying the cold, harsh nature of heartache and the unwritten forever mapped out track-by-track. 

Something I’ve touched on from time to time in my writing is my intimate familiarity with the demise of a long-term relationship I believed to last forever, as well as its resulting existential aftermath. Trying to wade through every difficult emotion while also attempting to salvage yourself and move on is no easy task. Structurally, Foxes in the Snow takes the listener through the events and effects of Isbell’s divorce in almost chronological order. Tracks like “Gravelweed” move through his reconciliation with himself, while the title track celebrates his current relationship. I feel intrinsically linked to this record, not only because of my own complicated emotions and experiences, but also through this intimate illusion of sitting in the room with Isbell as he performs it, with every pained, aching emotion he sends through the sound waves echoing my own. 

I can only hope that one day I will reach his level of self-understanding and feel the warmth of newfound love again, but in the meantime, I have this eloquently written, perfectly executed, and exquisitely paced 40-minute recording to come back to and cherish forever. 

And I’m sure time will change me some.

Honorable Mentions:

  • Coheed and Cambria - The Father of Make Believe 

  • Cheem - Power Move

  • Momma - Welcome to My Blue Sky

  • Motion City Soundtrack - The Same Old Wasted Wonderful World

  • This Is Lorelai - Box for Buddy, Box for Star (Deluxe)


Katie Hayes | Hayley Williams – Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party

Post Atlantic

You wake up from a dream. 

In this dream, you were fourteen, and you were in a band playing a birthday party with your best friends. Then your parents were standing over you in an Atlantic Records meeting room. Determined and frazzled, you were trying to explain to your parents and the men in suits that you’re in a band, that it shouldn’t just be your name on that line to sign. Then you were on a stage, a huge stage in New York City, then London, then Jakarta, then an exclusive cruise just for fans of your band. A million voices across the world and years, echoing yours. Then it was 2017 in the dream. Two of your friends are gone, one is back, and one has been there the whole time. That one always seems like he’s on the verge of telling you something whenever your old bald boyfriend leaves the room. Then you’re in that Nashville studio with your friend again, but this time he’s hugging your waist. Five years pass in the dream, and you’re standing next to him and your other friend, the one from the fourteen-year-old birthday party, except this time it’s not a birthday party, it’s Taylor Swift’s tour, the biggest stage on earth. Then the song is over. You hold hands with your band, and you take a bow.

And then you wake up from the dream. And you write an album about it.

Other 2025 Favorites:

  • Greg Freeman - Burnover

  • Jay Som - Belong

  • Jensen McRae - I Don’t Know How But They Found Me!

  • Samia - Bloodless

  • Wednesday - Bleeds


Josh Ejnes | Greg Freeman – Burnover

Transgressive Records

For me, 2025 has been a year filled with more old music than new, which is a roundabout way of saying that I spent an inadvisable amount of time listening to NRBQ and Faces. What makes both of these bands so compelling is the way that they pair expert songwriting with the feeling that the wheels are about to come off, something NRBQ executes by being coy and off-kilter, and Faces execute by being drunk. The end result of this is studio recordings that feel live and live recordings that feel insane. Greg Freeman's Burnover is cut from this same cloth, pairing expert songcraft with a band going into hyperdrive and coming out as my album of the year with a bullet. The second the harmonica hit on “Point and Shoot,” I knew that this was the record for me. I'd been jumping from new release to new release, finding things I liked but didn't love, unable to put my finger on what exactly I was looking for, then I put on Burnover and bam, total bliss. The whole thing just rocks, from the masterclass in escalation “Gulch” to the tender and contemplative “Sawmill,” it’s hit after hit after hit. If you haven't heard this, you need to listen to it. If you have listened to it, listen to it again. It gets better every time. 

Other 2025 Favorites:

  • Saba and No I.D. - From the Private Collection of Saba and No I.D.

  • Marble Teeth - there was a huge crowd of people gathered in the streets

  • Jay Som - Belong

  • lots of hands - into a pretty room

  • MyVeronica/Friend’s House - Farewell Skylines


Parker White | Water From Your Eyes – It’s a Beautiful Place

Matador Records

Since black midi’s disbandment last year, I’ve been chasing the dragon. I never knew what exactly to expect when I hit play on a new black midi track, but I knew I’d hear something brilliant, daring, and spine-tingling. After It’s a Beautiful Place, Water From Your Eyes might have taken the experimental indie rock mantle. From the moment I heard lead single “Life Signs,” WFYE’s new album immediately topped my most anticipated albums of the year, and it did not disappoint. In what has become typical fashion, this record never stays in the same place for more than a few measures. Song-to-song, verse-to-verse, things are constantly shifting while remaining miraculously consistent. You’ll hear a lot of things that sound like songs you’ve heard before until those familiar ideas are sliced in half with buzzsaw guitar or drowned out by a breakbeat. No one is quite as willing to color outside the lines as Water From Your Eyes, and I’m waiting with bated breath to see what they do next.

Other 2025 Favorites:

  • Ribbon Skirt - Bite Down

  • Greg Freeman - Burnover

  • Mac Demarco - Guitar

  • Black Country, New Road - Forever, Howlong

  • Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band - New Threats From The Soul



Connor Fitzpatrick | Cory Hanson – I Love People

Drag City Inc.

Dear reader, 

I’ve been listening to Cory Hanson’s I Love People fairly religiously since it came out this summer. Sadly, I tend to treat a lot of albums like single-use plastics, checking them out to see what’s up, then tossing them aside without the fair chance of a second or third listen. This is a me problem, and maybe I’ll make it a resolution to focus on the reuse element of the three main tenets of recycling next year. So why do I keep returning to I Love People with such regularity? Well, because it has the songs, man. The album is a shining collection of eleven nuggets each with their own unique embellishments. Opener “Bird On a Swing” is a breathtaking country-rock ode to the highs and lows of personal freedom. One of the things I really love about this album is how Hanson leans into his sardonic side. “Joker” and the title track “I Love People” are both swaggering horn-laden jams that create a sense of intrigue where you can’t tell if Hanson is being sincere or if he’s fucking with you. The saccharine Christmas carol “Santa Claus Is Coming Back to Town” reads like a lost Denis Johnson short story that details the lonely existence of an Afghanistan war veteran. In the past, I’ve loved Hanson’s work, both solo and with his band Wand, for his approach to psychedelic, guitar-driven rock, but I Love People is a stark departure as he flaunts his skills as a concise singer-songwriter. I hope you give this album a listen.

Much love,
Connor

P.S. Here are a few other albums I loved this year.

  • Brian Dunne, Clams Casino

  • Greet Death, Die In Love

  • Maria Somerville, Luster

  • Die Spitz, Something to Consume

  • Addison Rae, Addison

The Best of Q2 2025

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We’re halfway through 2025, and it feels like my brain is contorting into shapes it was never meant to hold. Unlike my intro for our favorites of Q1, I’m going to try my best not to go on a screed, but it’s hard not to treat these roundups as little check-ins. It’s also hard not to be upset at the countless acts of violence, injustice, and just plain stupidity being carried out in our name and on our dollar. It’s hard to conceive of because sometimes our day-to-day feels so completely unchanged or mind-numbingly banal. Hell, some days are even great. Then that feels weird because you’re allowing yourself one ounce of joy in the company of friends and loved ones, and suddenly you snap back to the reality of the world we’re living in. You remember the machine you’re a part of, and you try your best to operate outside of it, but sometimes that machine feels absolute and inescapable. 

I think what I’m trying to say is that this is a uniquely treacherous time to be alive, but there’s still beauty to be had. There’s salvation to be found in community, and there is support to be lent to those who need it. There’s art to share with each other, and that’s why we’re here. 

This past month, a couple of our friends had a beautiful, healthy baby. Another couple got a brand new puppy who’s barely big enough to make it up a single stair. I went to a baseball game primarily to down a beer, a hot dog, and fistfuls of popcorn. I had my 32nd birthday and was surrounded by all my beloved friends as we shot each other with squirt guns and shook our booties to Rihanna. I went to a music festival and hugged someone I loved. I took pictures outside of a tobacco shop in Ohio called “Butt Hut.” I shared some delicious meals with my beautiful girlfriend and watched Shakespeare in the park with friends. These are all varying levels of significance, and some of them might seem more frivolous or trivial than others, but they’re all part of the same thing. Finding the time to experience joy and wonder and happiness, acknowledging those feelings, and sharing them with as many people as possible is what it’s all about. 

With that in mind, please enjoy The Swim Team’s favorite albums from the last three months. Fifteen releases from fifteen artists, championed by fifteen different people. I hope you find something here to love.

First Day Back – Forward

Self-released

I’ve been an active participant in the emo scene for well over half my life at this point. I have seen its ebbs and flows, I’ve survived its famine years, and been relishing our current era of bounty. When one spends a long enough time being fully engrossed in the tides of genre, you begin to build a sense of which way the wind may start to blow. When I first heard The Arrival Note’s Vol. 2, I felt the tingle of an air pressure change, a movement in the sky that I surmised to be a harkening back to 90s emo that would find its way into our now burgeoning scene. Well, here we are, the first big gust to usher us towards our next few years of emo revival goodness. Actually, ‘revival’ doesn’t feel quite right. First Day Back’s debut effort is not them attempting to breathe life back into anything; it's all living, breathing experience, days and months and years and scattershot measurements of time clasped between moving string sections, moments pinched between their fret strings, memories weighing heavy on serenades and shouts.

Forward’s modus operandi, it seems, is to just be honest. Honest in feeling, honest in thought, honest in execution, and when all of that honesty starts condensing and collecting across the breadth of the album's thirty-four-minute runtime, the rain cloud accumulating over your spirit gets a spring-kissed summer shower. This album feels like a natural phenomenon in that way, and I think that with time and its tides, some kids in twenty years will point at this band and, through wide-eyed listening sessions of this album, want to find their own way through that same honesty. I'll be happy to press play on that one, too.
– Elias Amini


Turnstile – NEVER ENOUGH

Roadrunner Records

Turnstile’s summer blockbuster record, NEVER ENOUGH, has replenished for me the gigantic stadium rock feel from a band in their prime that I haven’t felt since the mid-2000s. It’s 45 minutes of crowd-pleasing summer rock action that scratches the itch of prime Red Hot Chili Peppers and Foo Fighters. NEVER ENOUGH is fully loaded with explosive melodic riffs and an ample number of sonic twists and turns.

“BIRDS” is an adrenaline-pumping jam if I ever heard one. The song moves faster than a muscle car driven by Dom Toretto; it’s Turnstile at their mosh-pitting best. I just want to break something or at least knock over a traffic cone at full force whenever this song comes on. The transitions are as smooth and seamless – being able to move from chunky guitar riffs to break beats at the drop of a hat makes for a thrilling listening experience. The best example I can give is “LOOK OUT FOR ME,” which flies by at 100 mph with Q101 rock radio riffs, then morphs into a minimalist synth club hit that is full-on transcendent.

This record can be listened to nonstop on runs through the park, while manning the grill, or even while meditating by the pool. NEVER ENOUGH’s sonic versatility is the Swiss-Army knife for rock music.
– David Williams


Careful Gaze – one day this will let you go

Self-released

Minneapolis rockers Careful Gaze have always been a little messy to categorize as far as genre is concerned. Generally, it’s fair to call them a mix of post-hardcore, metalcore, and heavy indie music. one day this will let you go feels special, shedding all of those labels to do something completely unique within their catalog. What we get is an ambient EP full of sound design, synths, and subdued vocals.

The first track, “you are the strongest that I know,” has a two-minute sound bath before vocalist Gabe Reasoner comes in to silently declare, “You should stay away from me.” They repeat the phrase until you realize that this is a break-up record borne out of the challenge of letting go of people you loved, or perhaps, still love. On the second track, Careful Gaze trades in the subdued energy of track one for trap hi-hats, a handclap snare, and swelling synths, creating a build that demands release in the form of the next song. 

It’s on the closing title track where the emotional design of the record really shines. It challenges the listener to break composure while Gabe’s vocal delivery screams out, raising in intensity until the last line, dropping back down to close the record by saying “it’s fucked no matter what,” an acknowledgement that sometimes brokenness is just brokenness. There isn’t much hope here. This is simply the work of a broken person writing about brokenness.

This EP begs a few questions about Careful Gaze’s next full-length record. Will we see more of this lush sound design that’s being spotlighted on this EP? Will we get a resolution for the heartbreak we see here? It’s impossible to know what’s next, but I’m waiting with bated breath to see where this band will be landing when they hit the ground again.
– Noëlle Midnight


Panel – A Great Time to Be an Empath

Don’t Sing 

With each spin of Panel’s debut album, A Great Time to Be an Empath, the more I feel the need to grab someone, shake them, and scream at them about the things Annie Sparrows’ songwriting makes me feel. Throughout this record, Sparrows aches for some sort of relief from the horrors of trying to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality. The moment that hits the hardest for me is after the second verse of “Victoria” when she gently croons that titular name, and her voice is so full of desperate hope that someday she’ll be able to sit comfortably in her skin. “Victoria” does what I want every new song I hear to do, to leave me breathless and lost for words to describe what just happened and how the hell I could feel all of that in under two minutes. And it is not the only song on the record that makes me feel that way. It can’t be when the record opens the line “Everybody knows that the place to start / is before the end, before the part / where you began to go but you didn’t even know / it was the start of the lights out slip” spoken over a motorik rhythm that perfectly evokes the dissociative numbness that comes with living just to make it through the day and has a piano ballad as its centerpiece about a pets love performed like a lounge act. It’s a great time to listen to A Great Time to Be an Empath.
– Lillian Weber


Forest Spirit, Sun on Your Back – winnowing

Self-released

One way I try to remember each month is with a playlist of new-to-me music. In May, I heard “Out of Season” by Forest Spirit, Sun on Your Back. It’s from their 2023 debut album, and liberally abuses the stereo audio format to split each guitar beat, giving the song an interesting and intentionally disjointed character. This, among other bit-crushing, oversaturating, and noisy tricks, was intriguing enough for a whole album play. Luckily for me, that same month they released their sophomore LP, winnowing. This second effort explores the softer side of low-fidelity recording. There are still plenty of crunchy crescendos and haphazard buzzings throughout, but each song feels more considered. They back off the chaos of their first album to introduce a meticulous melange, which is acoustic-forward and ever so slightly polished. If you’re a fan of Wednesday, glass beach, or Hey, ILY, you’ll find something to love about Forest Spirit, Sun on Your Back.
– Braden Allmond


The Callous Daoboys – I Don’t Want To See You In Heaven

MNRK Records

I’ve had the pleasure of working at a lovely, albeit somewhat niche, museum since October, and I still find new little nooks, crannies, and didactics throughout the exhibits to keep me invested. Being a museum employee also grants complimentary access to other museums, such as The Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and the Seattle Art Museum, to name a few. However, one doesn’t need reciprocity to enter the Museum of Failure, an interactive auditory museum curated by the six-piece post-hardcore band The Callous Daoboys. 

This museum is sprawling with different exhibits, ranging from the downright ridiculously heavy (“Tears on Lambo Leather,” “Full Moon Guidance,” “The Demon Of Unreality Limping Like A Dog”) to catchy (“Two-Headed Trout,” “Lemon,” “Distracted By The Mona Lisa”) to spacy (“Body Horror For Birds”). Some artifacts scare viewers while others will bring them to tears of laughter like the downright ridiculous A GAGA BOO AAGAA BOO BOO AAGAA in “Idiot Temptation Force.”

The crown jewel of this museum belongs to “III. Country Song In Reverse,” an almost twelve-minute colossus of sounds ranging from a two-minute ambient southern soundscape to thunderous breakdowns to an auto tuned repetition of “I Love You” culminating in frontman Carson Pace screaming, “I am worthy of the ark and I hope to god you can’t swim.” 

There’s a lot of laughter, a lot of tears, and a lot of heavy shit in between. Is that not what life is? Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but what I marvel at in the Museum of Failure is a group of artists who play to all of their strengths without sacrificing their uniqueness. God bless The Callous Daoboys.
– Samuel Leon


MSPAINT – No Separation

Convulse Records

I used to work at a free museum that had a wax-coated sculpture in its sculpture garden. At 2 PM on the dot, every day, a mirrored skyscraper in a different neighborhood would aim a direct beam of light and heat onto this sculpture, melting it. But every day, the museum’s restoration team would fix it—kind of a standing battle with art and capital.

This is the stubborn determination that No Separation from Hattiesburg’s MSPAINT reminds me of. In their last release, 2023’s Post-American, MSPAINT dealt in potential energy, constantly building up momentum and threatening release. In No Separation, they release it, almost leering as they proclaim a positive future amongst the wasteland.

These past couple of months have been inundated with people talking about the boundaries of hardcore, and while all that’s been going on, MSPAINT has been digging under the genre and unearthing the unruly heartbeat that drives the sound. The result? No Separation. So what if it all melts? We’ll rebuild.
– Caro Alt


Pelican – Flickering Resonance

Run For Cover

If there’s one theme that echoes throughout Flickering Resonance, Pelican’s first new record in six years, it’s the beginning of a new era for the Chicago metal quartet. Many great artists work in trilogies, such as David Bowie’s series from Berlin in the 1970s, or U2’s collaborations with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois in the 1980s. Flickering Resonance marks the seventh full-length album from Pelican, and the start of what could be a third album trilogy nearly twenty-five years into their career.

Their dynamic sound, established since 2003’s Australasia and perfected on 2009’s What We All Come To Need, continues through new catalog classics like “Gulch” and “Wandering Mind.” The explosive and theatrical passages on “Cascading Crescent” and “Pining For Ever” fill the room with whatever speakers they’re blasting on, helping paint a soaring, loud rock landscape with the rest of the LP. Pelican has been one of my home city’s most important bands to me, and their staying power has only strengthened with the release of Flickering Resonance, unleashed to a dark world now made much brighter.
– Logan Archer Mounts


Arm’s Length – There's A Whole World Out There

Pure Noise Records

At this point, there are few members left in the emo cognoscenti to sway regarding Arm’s Length’s mastery of the craft. Signing to genre-behemoth Pure Noise Records was merely a stepping stone before unleashing their sophomore LP, There’s A Whole World Out There, a record that features the group proving they’re anything but a one-album wonder. Admittedly, I was optimistically wary at first listen, because how does a group one-up a generational debut like Never Before Seen, Never Again Found? Thankfully, I was completely enamored by the rebuttal album on release day. What makes the Canada-based unit special is their knack for crafting something comprehensive and cohesive.

As is common in the emo genre, the band's initial full-length, NBSNAF, was lyrically condemned by its nostalgia-drunk tilt. The feeling is a drug – hard to quit and easy to get lost in. However, Arm’s Length find their way out on their newest LP, rooting themselves firmly in the present. Vocalist Allen Steinberg writes from hindsight's perspective this time around, and while this album is still very much sad, it takes a different outlook on it. Such is evident on heavy-hitting cuts like “The Wound,” where Steinberg pleads, “Time will heal me, will I stick around to see it?” 

If I had to whittle down this album to 300 words or less (which is what I’m attempting), I’d say it’s largely about being overtly self-aware and viewing past mistakes through a magnifying lens. Being aware enough to recognize and admit that, yeah, there is a whole world out there waiting for me, but right now, it appears too large for me to conquer. So, this album begs the question: if there is a whole world out there, where do we go from here?
– Brandon Cortez


honeybee – midtown girl

Good Luck

A dynamic, warm indie rock record that feels like locking eyes with a beloved friend across a crowded party, right when they walk in the door. Chock full of 90s influences, beautifully produced, and adorned with some of the most confusingly tight harmonies of the year, midtown girl is the sound of a band loosening up—and shifting into a new gear as a result. It’s fun, it’s efficient, it’s a lovely companion to 2024’s Saturn Return, and it sounds perfect in whichever Midtown you’re closest to.

Regarding the 90’s influences, honeybee lead singer/songwriter Makayla Scott said, “There are just these things that are ingrained in a lot of us because that's what we grew up on...it is an amalgamation of everything that I've ever known and loved, which is 90’s Country and also a lot of Y2K Pop music. Avril, Ashlee Simpson, and then some Alanis Morissette, some Liz Phair. I'm not making direct references, but the references are just there because that's what I grew up loving and learning from.”

honeybee aimed for authenticity with midtown girl. The heart and the feeling both come through, not only lyrically but with the passion and intentionality of the vocals and instrumentals. “With midtown girl, Ian Dobyns, who is the co-producer, engineer, mixer…was really coaching me this time to deliver feeling, and to not worry about precision. So now, when I listen back on these vocal takes, there are things that I would consider not technically perfect, but the whole vibe of the song and the record feel perfect.”
– Caleb Doyle


Hayden Pedigo – I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away

Mexican Summer

In the Sacramento Valley, heat waves slither atop the molten asphalt, and mirages shimmer among the brittle grasses. The violently warm air chaps my lungs from the inside, but at least it’s a dry heat. (That’s what they say, anyway.) To cope with the arid western summer, I have found myself spinning the perfect album for such weather: I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away by Hayden Pedigo. This instrumental folk record is a yellow-gold masterpiece, with guitar melodies that wrap you in a woolen embrace and bring grassy mirages to life. From nostalgic pieces like “Houndstooth” to the atmospheric title track, Hayden’s skillful playing will pull at your heart and tighten your chest. You’re not even sure what you’re sad about, but you feel a great and cosmic grief weighing on your shoulders. His writing is dotted with delicate phrasing and sparingly placed harmonics that feel just right, demonstrating masterful restraint. “Smoked” is the stand-out track: melancholy wanderings and improvisation, divided by pauses that feel like a sigh, prove Hayden’s exemplary storytelling. I take a deep breath. My lungs hurt, and it smells like scorched dust. But at least it’s a dry heat.
– Britta Joseph


Ribbon Skirt – Bite Down

Mint Records

The first time I heard Bite Down, I found myself helplessly mesmerized. I had few things to compare it to, but midway through “Dead Horse,” I realized the closest reference point I could pull was Japanese Breakfast’s “Diving Woman.” Both songs serve similar purposes as their respective albums’ transportive opening tracks, slowly unfurling and welcoming the listener into the world that the band inhabits. The thing with Bite Down is that feeling didn’t let up. As the Anishinaabe group phases from the spooky hyperventilated breathing of “Cellophane” to the groovy wink of “Off Rez,” I remained spellbound. There’s the piercing scream near the end of “Wrong Planet,” the carefree post-punk bop of “Look What You Did,” and then the apocalyptic world-ending reset of “Earth Eater.” Throughout it all, the band captures a unique sense of displacement, betrayal, and perseverance that feels authentic to who this group of musicians are culturally and creatively. A rock record unlike any others this year or ever before.
– Taylor Grimes


Hemmingway Lane – “Shattered Glass”

Klepto Phase

I am from just south of Michigan, about 15 minutes from the border, and something about the state always seemed magical to me. It was this place just out of reach and out of time, and I have been chasing that nostalgic high ever since. I was able to find it again last year when Hemmingway Lane reached out to me and asked me to cover their EP Let The Flowers Die. They liked the review so much that I was able to hear “Shattered Glass” as an unmixed phone demo many months ago, and I have been eagerly awaiting its release ever since. I am pleased to report that the full song exceeds expectations in every way. In the past, Hemmingway Lane has focused on a slower indie rock sound that is reminiscent of The Backseat Lovers; however, on this track, they unlock something new in their sound. 

“Shattered Glass” is a song about the time someone threw a rock through lead singer Elijah Flood’s back windshield. However, like all art, it takes on a deeper meaning, one of truly accepting the place you are in life. It is the kind of concept that really sticks with me as I enter the period of my life where I am realizing that I am no longer who I once was, and I never will be again. It will just take some time, but eventually I'll take the shards of my splintered existence and put them into something new and beautiful.
– Ben Parker


Momma – Welcome to My Blue Sky

Polyvinyl Record Co.

The fourth studio album by Los Angeles-based Indie rock band Momma is one of those records that hit me pretty casually upon first listen, but am now regularly throwing on at work when I gain control of the aux both as a small comfort to myself and also like I’m teaching the patrons of the bustling cafe what Indie rock music is truly capable of being. Moody lyrics about love and longing delicately accompany some of the surprisingly punchiest riffs I’ve heard in a while. Heavy hitters like “Rodeo” steadily planted themselves in my brain until I realized this is one of the best albums I’ve heard all year in some unexpected, beautiful Stockholm syndrome effect. So much of this album’s power lies in the atmosphere created by tracks like “Stay All Summer,” which constantly oscillates between subtle strums and shrieking guitar tones, along with the eerie electronic effects of sleepy comforts like “New Friend.” One of the singles from the album, “Bottle Blonde,” specifically commands the utmost attention and places Welcome to My Blue Sky in the upper echelon of 2025’s offerings. The nostalgic melodies, instrumentation, and composition of this powerhouse remind me of my favorite “girl rock” bands of the late 90s and early 00s and could not be more at home in a well-patronized coffee shop or blaring from your bedroom speakers while you paint your nails and try to expunge your ex from your thoughts. As we launch headlong into the summer, there is no better time to spin this emotive collection of fair-weather hits.
– Ciara Rhiannon


PinkPantheress – Fancy That

Warner Records

Resident pop Swimmer reporting for duty. I was less than impressed with PinkPantheress’s sophomore LP, 2023’s heaven knows. Too minimal for my liking; I needed an oversaturation of elements to have even the slightest chance of stopping The Thoughts. “Tonight,” Pink’s first single of the year, was everything I thought heaven knows wasn’t—thumping, bubbly, clubby, relentless, addictive. The kind of song you hear playing in your head as you stick your head out the window of the Uber home. The rest of Fancy That matches that energy, stacking sample upon sample as Pink skates across house-adjacent trip-pop backbeats with her signature veil of indifference. “Illegal” is already going down as my song of the year—I’m convinced the opening synths could bring me back from the dead. I love this mixtape so much that I waited 35 minutes in a queue to secure tickets for her tour. She’s just doing it for me right now. See you in October, queen!
– Cassidy Sollazzo

Swim Into The Sound Turns Ten

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As of today, Friday, June 13th, 2025, Swim Into The Sound is officially TEN years old! Since I just waxed poetic about the site for our 500th post a month ago, I’ll try to keep this short and sweet. 

After going back and forth for a while debating how to best commemorate this birthday, I decided it’d be fun to ask the Swim Team what their favorite album of the last ten years was. We’re counting everything from 2015 to 2025, and because I’m a real dork with it, we’re also only counting the window that this blog has existed: from June 2015 to June 2025—the last ten years to the day. I’ve organized everyone's answers in chronological order (Thank you, Lillian), and we’ve got some fun stats at the end for the Heads (Thank you, Braden), so keep reading after the roundup.

Before we get to the proceedings, I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you for being here; thank you for reading, sharing, writing, and supporting this little website. It means the world to me, and I am continually ecstatic to have this outlet to talk about the music that I enjoy and believe in. I think all the people you’re about to read would say the same thing. Thanks for ten years, and thank you for caring. As always, I hope you find something here to love. 

Please enjoy this journey through the past ten years guided by your trusty Swim Team. 

One Direction – Made in the A.M.

Columbia

Released November 13, 2015

One Direction hated being in One Direction by the end of it, and in 2015, they broke up. They actually never formally did this, but they released Made in the A.M., which is the closest they could get to ending things. One Direction songs aren’t vapid, but they are vague, leaning into the searing Bo Burnham analysis, “I love your eyes and their blueish, brownish, greenish color” at their weakest. There’s always some love that they want but can’t have. Made in the A.M., however, feels uncomfortable in that structure. Songwriter and appointed Cheeky One, Louis Tomlinson, used that framework to craft a goodbye rather than their usual popstar mystique. Finality underscores songs like “Love You Goodbye,” “History,” and “Walking in the Wind,” becoming bittersweet letters to fans rather than their usual tortured, lovesick songs. 

The whole album sounds Un-Direction as well, with a rounder, synthier, stomp pop sound, something that matched their contemporaries rather than their discography. I love Made in the A.M. for that weirdness, even that title —a begrudging nod to the fact that all this was recorded in the grueling early hours of the morning on their tour bus as they traversed the world without Zayn Malik. And then that was just it. A couple live performances, a lackluster rollout, no tour, and a promise that the band would come back once they were off a needed hiatus. Now, 10 years later, the band won’t and can’t come back, but in the words of One Direction’s final song, “A.M.,” it’s okay because “I'm always gonna look for your face,” and as a forever Directioner, I really will always look for them.
– Caro Alt


Aesop Rock – The Impossible Kid

Rhymesayers

Released April 29, 2016

After much intensive deliberation, I feel confident that Long Island rapper Aesop Rock’s seventh album, The Impossible Kid, probably holds the most emotional weight to me of the thousands of albums I’ve heard since June of 2015. Originally my #3 record of the year after its release, it’s a proof of concept that tastes change and grow stronger over the years, and an album you listen to a handful of times in a 365-day span doesn’t have to be confined to that timeline.

Aesop Rock has been my favorite rapper since 2012’s Skelethon, and when The Impossible Kid dropped four years later, I was out of college and living on my own, making the first real transition to conscious adulthood. While much of Aesop Rock’s lyricism is abstract and conceptual, this album is his most directly personal across his discography, referencing multiple stories from his childhood and tributes to longtime friends and family. Particularly the song “Blood Sandwich,” the second verse of which Aes raps about his older brother being denied tickets to see Ministry, deeply affected me. Hearing two of my musical loves intersect in this way resonated with me, as I had gone through a similar experience when I was younger.

Whether he’s criticizing the ins and outs of the rap world (‘Dorks’) or boasting about his cat (‘Kirby’), Aesop Rock shines on The Impossible Kid in a way that is so specific to this album only. From a technical standpoint, it almost feels like he’s still trying to one-up himself, like on 2023’s head-spinningly impressive Integrated Tech Solutions, and even his just-released Black Hole Superette. But to me, there isn’t a rap album that speaks more to nerdy, introspective, and emotional youths than The Impossible Kid.
– Logan Archer Mounts


The Hotelier – Goodness

Tiny Engines

Released May 27, 2016

In 2016, I worked my first full-time job as a residence director at a private college on Long Island. I didn’t live far from my alma mater, so I was in this liminal space of young adulthood, where many friends were still at school while I worked a day job taking care of people just like them. It was a year of transition. I was shedding relationships, beliefs, and happiness.

My constant was music. The LI emo scene was instrumental for me. I had left all of my childhood friends in the city to make new ones at college. We moshed to easycore, pop-punk, post-hardcore, and what is now called “mall emo.” Being away from old friends, I grew perpendicular to them and my younger self. I became way too into my head. I needed to get out of it and touch grass.

Goodness came out just over a year after I graduated college. I felt ennui on Long Island, in my job, in my relationships. I couldn’t envision a life for myself there; Brooklyn, changed but still mine, beckoned me. I quit my job over some bullshit miscommunication about my dog, and didn’t look back.

The Hotelier kept me company on that final drive back to my parents’ house. With Franklin the pug in shotgun and my life packed into the backseat and trunk of my Civic, I yelled “I don’t know if I know love no more” to “Piano Player” while I sped down the Southern State Parkway. I embraced agnosticism on “Two Deliverances,” meditated on “Sun,” and considered death on “Opening Mail for My Grandmother.” I mourned a forever-lost love on “You in this Light.” I felt that chapter of my life close on “End of Reel.”

Revisiting Goodness now, I bloom in gratitude for that time, for this album, and for my life.
– Joe Wasserman


Touché Amoré – Stage Four

Epitaph Records

Released September 16, 2016

It was brutally hot the day my grandpa died. I had driven to his house to say goodbye, knowing that this would be the last time. I clasped his fragile hand and smiled through the tears that burned like fire in my eyes, trying to memorize every painful detail of those moments. Afterwards, I dragged myself out to my car in a haze, sliding into what felt like an oven as I gingerly closed the door. The silence was deafening, and I couldn’t bear to sit with it. The only album I wanted to listen to was one that had already carried me through years of pain and grief – Touché Amoré’s Stage Four. The album is both sonically and topically heavy, tackling the loss of frontman Jeremy Bolm’s mother to cancer. My grandpa died from cancer as well, and as I watched him suffer and wither over the course of a year, I returned again and again to Stage Four. I found myself taking comfort from Jeremy’s words as my heart screamed that I, too, knew this pain. Dense and beautiful, each song soars to massive emotional heights and crashes into frantic, melodic choruses as brutally honest lyrics about grief thread through the entire record. I was fractured like glass on that hot September afternoon, but Stage Four pieced me back together.
– Britta Joseph


Bon Iver – 22, A Million

Jagjaguwar

Released September 30, 2016

I was not thriving when 22, A Million dropped in September of 2016. I was living in a townhouse packed too-full of college dudes and scrambling to maintain a relationship that was winding down to its inevitable end. My undiagnosed scrupulosity (religious OCD) had reached a fever pitch, and I was functioning at peak neurosis, all atoms vibrating and neon.

I don’t know if any record has affected me so viscerally on a first listen. It might be over soon. God, I hope so. The new songs were beautifully damaged, everything pushed into the red, held together with desperation and scotch tape, as fragile as I was. While Vernon’s voice and the indie-folk-mad-scientist production were the first things to grab me, the occult symbolism and numerology proved genuinely unsettling; having grown up in a fundamentalist Christian sect, becoming obsessed with an album that quite literally takes you to hell and back was functionally my own bizarre, self-administered form of exposure therapy. I think 22, A Million is possibly one of the most influential records of the past decade, but I’m writing about it because it feels like it was made just for me. At the risk of overspiritualizing, its existence feels damn near providential. Well it harms me, it harms me, it harms me, I'll let it in.
– Nick Webber


Black Marble – It’s Immaterial

Ghostly International

Released October 14, 2016

I sometimes accidentally Pavlov myself into enjoying things. Half a decade ago, I had one too many jumbo margs, promptly threw up on the sidewalk, then trudged three long blocks home. When I fell on my bed, I thought, “You know what would really help these spins? Some electronica from New York.” I don’t listen to electronica or anything adjacent. At least I didn’t use to. I fell asleep, and in my drunkenness, I looped the album and immediately lost my phone behind my bed. I was too uncoordinated to stop it from playing for eleven full hours (surprisingly, I wasn’t too drunk to plug my phone in beforehand). I woke up a changed man, with a newfound distaste for tequila and a burgeoning love for a genre I never paid much attention to before. 

These tracks have been with me for most of graduate school, and I have memories—good and bad—for each. I listened to “Frisk” 27 times in a row, mid-Covid, figuring out a single statistical mechanics question. Black Marble conjures full cities and surrounding landscapes, using understated vocalizations that seep into and become part of their masterful, bass-forward, fully synthetic creations. Through years and mile-high waves of self-doubt, It’s Immaterial is the buoy that has kept me afloat.
– Braden Allmond


The Menzingers – After the Party

Epitaph Records

Released February 3, 2017

When I think about records that have had a profound impact on me over the last decade, the fifth studio album, After the Party, by American punk rock band The Menzingers always finds its way around the top of the running every single time. Introduced to me during our junior year of college by my best bud and all-around punk enthusiast, Avery, I was immediately arrested by The Menzingers’ effortless song structures, candid lyricism, Irish-Catholic sensibilities, and the way the band unapologetically exudes “Americana.” After the Party tackles the daunting themes of growing beyond your reckless years, facing a new decade of adulthood, and reconciling with the most regrettable aspects of yourself – delivering it all in a way that kicks my ass upon every subsequent listen, but always manages to keep me coming back for another round. As I stare down the barrel of thirty-years old just a month from now, I find myself coming back to the repetitious line “Where are we gonna go now that our twenties are over?” from the album’s opening track “Tellin' Lies.” I’ve never been more uneasy about entering a new stage of my life than I am now at the edge of my twenties, but I’m also holding on to this comforting notion that the party ain’t over. Even though ultimately deciding on my “favorite” album of the past ten years feels impossible, I can’t think of another album that so accurately represents those years, nor feels more ubiquitous across them than After the Party. 
– Ciara Rhiannon


SZA – Ctrl

Top Dawg Entertainment

Released June 9, 2017

Ctrl came out on my last day of high school. SZA’s full-length debut is now regarded as one of the most important releases of the 2010s, and it is certainly one of the most important releases of my 2015–2025. While a lot of albums from my teens exist in one fixed point of my memory, Ctrl has wiggled its way into every moment of change I’ve found myself in since its release. It played in my headphones on my flight to college, on my walk to my first class. It played at a consistent, low hum that emanated from my bottom bunk. I’ve screamed the words to “Prom” in mid-summer euphoria, windows down, sun out, ocean in my hair, driving a little too fast over the bridge. I’ve had pensive, tearful sunset walks to “20 Something,” wondering if I was ever gonna get my shit together. SZA has a way of making the most specific of situations feel universal, of summing up a generation's worth of anxieties into a few sparse lines (“Fearing not growing up / Keeping me up at night / Am I doing enough / Feels like I’m wasting time” couldn’t sum up my existential worries better). I mean, “Normal Girl”???? It’s like SZA ascended from the heavens and blessed girls everywhere with the soundtrack of their early adulthood.
– Cassidy Sollazzo


Manchester Orchestra – A Black Mile To The Surface

Loma Vista Recordings and Favorite Gentlemen

Released July 21, 2017

I sometimes get emotional thinking about all the people in my life who have loved me, who have cared for me when I was difficult to love or self-destructive. I’ve made it so hard on so many people, but I’ve been loved deeply. I especially appreciate this because we live in a culture that seems to communicate that love is earned. If you’re convenient, if you keep the scales balanced, don’t take more than you give. If someone can use you or extract something from you, then you’ll be loved. But I’ve been given so much grace. What the fuck.

Andy Hull has this ability to write songs about people who are ugly and hopeless, but you end up caring for them and identifying with them and wishing them well. You end up growing eyes to see the lonely and broken people around you. The folks that seem to get pushed out from the middle of the circle. This is the sort of album that makes me think maybe we can all learn to grasp Each Other and grasp God and grasp Love and actually make sure that none of us go it alone. 
– Ben Sooy


Amen Dunes – Freedom

Sacred Bones

Released March 30th, 2018

Freedom is my favorite album of the last decade because, no matter how many times I listen to it, there’s always something new that I haven’t considered or noticed. It’s an elusive album for me. I can never quite put my finger on what's really going on with it. Is it a mystical bent on classic rock? Maybe it’s a long-lost adult contemporary album from the turn of the millennium, a dark and beautiful companion that might slide into a radio rotation filled with David Gray and Dido. Whatever it is, Damon McMahon gets it the most correct when on “Blue Rose” he sings, “We play religious music, I don’t think you’d understand, man.” He’s right, trying to wrap your mind around this music isn’t the point. It’s not present in our realm for the sake of classification and dissection; it’s here for experiencing and feeling. If your senses have not been graced by Freedom, then I suggest giving it a go on your next road trip, preferably a summer one, bonus points if it’s along the coast. That’s where you’ll sink into its essence. 
– Connor Fitzpatrick


Parquet Courts – Wide Awake!

Rough Trade Records

Released May 18, 2018

Although released in 2018, I didn’t get around to Wide Awake! until 2020. Global pandemic, lockdown, nationwide protests over police killings. You remember. In the early days, it was a time to escape the rhythms of modernity and sublimate myself into the couch, subsisting on government checks, homemade mai tais, and Mario Maker 2. It’s there in my complacent crysallis that this album came like a nasty right hook to the spirit. 

Dense with aphorisms both didactic and daring (“Travel where you are, tourism is sin” from “Tenderness,” or “What is an up-and-coming neighborhood and where is it coming from?” from “Violence”), the record, and its title track, serve as a clarion call to move and embrace and rage and shake loose the complacency. The record sounds like Parquet Courts, but their collaboration with Danger Mouse pushed their “Sonic Youth by way of Pavement” sound to new heights, yielding such joys as the 70s dance rhythms of “Wide Awake” or the pristine, soaring hopefulness of “Freebird II.” Part political polemic, part personal wound-bearing, each track on Wide Awake!, from its opening screed (the Tom Brady-hating collectivists’ handbook “Total Football”), to its closing track (the drunken bar singalong anthem “Tenderness”) the album is an anathema for alienation, a record that proves more and more valuable as time goes on. We don’t need any more televised killings or a global pandemic to shake ourselves awake. We’ve got all the tools here. 
– Joshua Sullivan


KIDS SEE GHOSTS – KIDS SEE GHOSTS

GOOD Music, Distributed by Def Jam

Released June 8, 2018

In a lot of ways, KIDS SEE GHOSTS was the last hurrah of an era. Still years out from Kanye West torpedoing his career down the toilet, the 2018 “Wyoming Sessions” that brought sudden turbo-charged energy to the hip-hop genre with five weekly records from GOOD Music artists, including the legendary Queensbridge MC Nas, and even this group representing the friendship between Kid Cudi and Kanye. I reminisce about this time period fondly.

Cudi and West have a cosmic spirit within them that rises to the surface on each song throughout. They both bring out the best in each other, much like legendary actors Robert De Niro and Al Pacino do in the crime thriller Heat. KIDS SEE GHOSTS is only seven songs, clocking in at 23 minutes with 0% body fat. Together, they produce a psychedelic blend of pure, unabashed artistry at its finest. “Reborn” is a spiritual masterpiece of two guys standing at different crossroads in their own lives. West tapped into a realness and heart with his lyrics, but Cudi steals the show, sounding like he’s found the peace that has escaped him for his entire life. The “Keep Moving Forward” lyric could have been a mantra Cudi used during his own dark days. This song is something I listened to almost religiously, and have applied this phrase to my own life to this day. Tough times don’t last forever; there’s always hope on the horizon if we keep moving forward.
– David Williams


Gouge Away – Burnt Sugar 

Deathwish Inc.

Released September 28, 2018

Gouge Away’s sophomore album, Burnt Sugar, is the sound of drifting bodiless through a life. It is the only album I can listen to when I feel like no matter how much I scream or cry or beg nothing will change, like when I can’t bear to get out of bed in the morning but have to get up because I’m out of sick days at work after I’ve used them all up on the countless depression addled exhausted mornings before this one, like when I’m a ghost, because no other album makes me feel less alone. This album sounds suffocating, like a hand around your neck as Christina Michelle screams of the ways she tries to stay grounded. If you need an album to keep you company, I’d suggest a whiff of Burnt Sugar. 
– Lillian Weber 


The Happy Children – Same Dif

Self-Released

Released June 18, 2019

Aside from some ambient essentials and recent Beatles reissues, this semi-obscure album (if you didn’t live in Minneapolis in 2018) has filled my headphones more than any other over the past decade. A decade of scrobbling doesn’t lie. The Happy Children were usually a trio, founded in the late 2010s by Caleb Wright and Mitchell Seymour. The group bubbled up with a mix of damaged art rock and the washed-out electronics that Wright would bring to his future production work. Their parting gift was a compulsively listenable, dynamic octet of songs, mapping the beginnings of dozens of paths not taken.

Same Dif remains a small miracle of experimental pop and marvelous weirdo rock about loving your friends, released at the crest of a surging wave of Minneapolis DIY music. For some strange streaming reason, the piano-pop closing track, “Bubblegum,” has 25 times more streams than the banger single with a video. It’s a pinball machine of a record, full of oddly hued lightbulbs, chiming jingles, and generous sound design; refreshing in how baffling it feels for the songs to get stuck in your head for days. The Happy Children ended just in time, precisely when they meant to, with a marvelous swan song.
– aly eleanor


Purple Mountains – Purple Mountains

Drag City

Released July 19, 2019

David Berman’s Purple Mountains is the authentic account of a man with nothing more to lose. There is a lot of pain found throughout the album with songs like “All My Happiness is Gone” and “Darkness and Cold” providing little to no hope or comfort. Berman’s songwriting on Purple Mountains is vulnerable, unflinching, and blunt—the most straightforward and least obtuse lyrics of his career. There’s little room for interpretation with lines like "the end of all wanting / is all I’ve been wanting" in album opener “That’s Just the Way That I Feel.” Thankfully, Berman’s opus is full of his signature humor and astute observations to balance out the ever-present sadness. 

Self-loathing is often met with incredible self-depricating wit: "If no one's fond of fucking me, / maybe no one's fucking fond of me" Berman states on "Maybe I'm the Only One for Me.” Punchlines and comedic scenes regularly couple moments of despair. “I nearly lost my genitalia / to an anthill in Des Moine” is a really funny thing to say shortly after saying “this kind of hurting won’t heal.” This needed comedic relief on the bummer numbers takes a break when Berman pivots toward the mundane. Scenes of snow falling or grief-stricken recollections of his mother are treated sincerely, resulting in perhaps his most serene and beautiful recordings. 

The loss of love, God, and spirit permeate Purple Mountains, but penultimate track “Storyline Fever” (a top 5 Berman song, if you ask me) gives us a glimmer of optimism that makes the album worthy of repeat listening: “you got to find a way to make it work / 'cause defeat is where your demons lurk.” 
– Russ Finn


Walter Mitty And His Makeshift Orchestra  – Puddles of Alligators

Making New Enemies

Released September 6, 2019

When I was first introduced to Walter Mitty and His Makeshift Orchestra, I had largely outgrown my hardcore/mall emo phase and was going through my indie fuckboy college era. That said, my frame of reference for “indie” was relatively narrow, mostly guided by whatever my Tumblr feed was currently obsessed with: Mac DeMarco, The 1975, Arctic Monkeys – not necessarily “indie” in the traditional sense, but I took the feed as bond. You can only imagine how my world was changed when I learned of DIY culture through Walter’s music, how everyday people were making art while working jobs or going to school, playing shows at houses and garages, printing shirts in their backyards. I’m blessed to have been introduced to DIY culture with Walter’s music, which I still listen to over a decade later. Puddles of Alligators is a collection of B-sides and loosies, some of which are staples with the Walter heads, while others made their debut with this release (the backyard performance of “Mellow” went platinum on my YouTube, years before this collection dropped). Even in a collection of loosies, Walter’s sharp songwriting and rhythmic guitar shine bright. And knowing that it’s just a bunch of buddies making music together, without a studio or contract forcing them to, makes it nothing short of magical.  
– Nickolas Sackett


Charli xcx – how i’m feeling now

Atlantic Records

Released May 15, 2020

At the end of 2019 and the start of 2020, I graduated from college, married my forever wife, and started my first big-boy job, all in the span of four weeks. I was working as a design engineer for a small company in a small Texas town outside of Austin. I was fresh on the scene and eager to please, which meant that once I was able to work from home, I was working all the time. I don’t remember exactly when I first listened to how i’m feeling now, but I do remember the shift that happened to me once I did. Before Charli, my go-to focus music was Frank Ocean’s Blonde and the soundtrack to Prince Avalanche. how i’m feeling now became a companion during the early mornings alone at the office, playing catch-up, and throughout the nights working from home while my wife was on a night shift. Charli’s familiar pop music sensibilities stuck me in the glue trap for the ripping saw-blade production to leave my eyes darting side to side, trying to trace its path. My After Charli Period has been filled with the PC Music universe, a massive amount of Whole Lotta Red, months of hard bop and free jazz, and whatever is playing on NTS Radio. This album is important to me because it marks a shift in my brain – a shift in how I see and value music. What was once a single-sided experience of sound waves hitting me now has the ability to be a two-way street. I realized that someone has to be wriggling around in that glue trap for the songs to really have impact. 
– Kirby Kluth


Slaughter Beach, Dog – At the Moonbase

Lame-O Records

Released December 24, 2020

I’ve always loved the way that training lineage is tracked in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, providing a family tree of student/teacher relationships that directly connect modern practitioners like Mikey Musumeci to Carlos Gracie and the sport’s creation. Although Gracie passed away before Musumeci was born, we can examine this lineage and see how his impact was still felt through osmosis, with the knowledge the old master passed on to his students working its way down the line to those pursuing the sport today. Rock music doesn’t feature this same kind of rigid hierarchy, but I think it’s at its best when you can discern a similar sense of history from it. This is why At the Moonbase is such a special record; it’s the place where Slaughter Beach, Dog’s sound transcends the current moment and connects with the legacy of all the great singer-songwriters who came before it. 

There are some more obvious sonic connections here—for example the way the spoken word delivery on tracks like “Do You Understand (What Has Happened to You)” and “Song for Oscar’s” bring to mind the work of Craig Finn—but even beyond that, the storytelling throughout the record calls back to the tradition of artists like Harry Chapin and Jim Croce (not to mention there is literally a song called “Van Morrison”). The album serves as a continuation of a bardic style that for so long has been a bedrock of popular music, doing so with a fresh sound pushed forward by Jake Ewald’s incredible arrangements. “A Modern Lay” is a masterclass in songwriting. “My Girl” does so much with so little. Not one bad song on the record. Thank you Slaughter Beach, Dog. 
– Josh Ejnes


Porter Robinson – Nurture

Mom+Pop 

Released April 23, 2021

Sometimes a record comes along at the right place and the right time, setting off a chain reaction that completely shifts how you view music and the world around you. It was the spring of 2021, and the northeast weather was starting to loosen its cold grip. I had just received the first dose of the COVID vaccine, and I began to see some of my friends in person again for the first time in over a year. Coming from someone who listened almost exclusively to heavier music at the time, the soundtrack of my reintroduction to the world came from a sonically unexpected place: a glitch pop album. 

I consider Nurture to be a landmark record in my journey not just as a music listener but also as a human being. I found myself moved by Porter’s lyrical articulations of feeling alive for the first time and holding what you love close to your heart amidst a comforting blanket of electronics. It shifted my brain from a sizably individualistic worldview to a more communal mindset, guiding me to fully appreciate and support the people in my life that made me who I am. The record encouraged me to seek out more versions of this glitchy yet exciting style of music, leading me down the road of alternative music and eventually landing me into a more well-rounded musical palette. I feel indebted to this album for making me a better person and giving me the confidence to confront my fears head-on. 

TLDR: If you knew me before Nurture, no you didn’t.
– Samuel Leon


Wednesday – Twin Plagues

Orindal Records

Released August 13, 2021

Even though this prompt was my own damn idea, I had the hardest time whittling down to decide what album was truly my favorite of the last decade. At times, I found myself waffling between Psyhopomp, New Hell, and a slew of emo bullshit (complimentary). Ultimately, I wound up pulling Wednesday’s sweltering third album, Twin Plagues. I’ve written at length about my love for this record as well as this band, and it’s been an affirming thrill to watch this crop of North Carolina artists rise to worldwide indie rock prominence over the last few years. While I have love for everything that came afterwards, Twin Plagues will forever hold a special place in my heart as an album that helped me through a dark time and inspired me to find the strength to pull myself out of it. The true testament is that I can listen to the record today and not be dragged back into those depths. I still get swept up in the shoegaze crush of the opening title track. I still am mesmerized by the seesaw riff in “Handsome Man.” I still think “How Can You Live” is one a goddamn miracle of a song. Much like Sufjan’s Michigan pointed me to Detroit years before, when I found myself moving to North Carolina in 2023, I looked to Twin Plagues as a sort of affirmation that I was heading in the right direction. After two beautiful years in this state, it turns out I wasn’t wrong. 
– Taylor Grimes


Alvvays – Blue Rev

Polyvinyl Record Co.

Released October 7, 2022

I’ve been listening to power pop and indie rock for longer than I’ve known what either was. R.E.M. was the first band I ever knew the name of, and from that point on, I was raised on a steady diet of ’80s and ’90s alternative courtesy of my Gen X parents. I’d hazard a guess that the masterminds in Alvvays had a similar upbringing because Blue Rev plays like a crash course in the sound of the first twenty years of my life. The guitars alternate between a supercharged fuzz and the vibrant jangle that I fell in love with as a child in the backseat of a beat up Honda Civic. Every synthesizer feels handpicked to evoke a specific memory in my mind. Oh you like shoegaze? Hit play and you’re immediately hit with “Pharmacist.”  Maybe you’re a lifelong new waver - that’s okay, “Very Online Guy” and “Velveteen” have you covered. If the R.E.M. shout perked your ears up, crank “After the Earthquake” up to max volume and then wonder why you’re still reading this instead of bouncing off your own walls.

All that would mean dirt though if it weren’t for Molly Rankin’s constant towing the line between wry wit and genuine pathos as both a singer and songwriter. In true power pop tradition, she’s able to wring both a laugh and a tear from her listeners, sometimes even with one twist of a phrase. On Blue Rev, she invokes heroes that range from Tom Verlaine to Belinda Carlisle to weave 14 perfect vignettes of loneliness, longing, and waiting. As someone who was entering their third decade far too used to disappointment, wasting time waiting for life to start, hearing an album I’d been anticipating for almost half a decade knock it out of the park was a near revelation. I’ve changed a lot in the two years since Blue Rev’s release, and my taste with me, but if I ever do reach back, it’s likely with Alvvays: all my favorite records and the boy I was rolled into one 38 minute package that ends with a dare: “Now that you’re around, take another shot.”
– Wes Cochran


Arm’s Length – Never Before Seen, Never Again Found

Wax Bodega

Released October 28th, 2022

This one grew on me in ways that growth is painful, yet cardinal. Akin to when you’re forced to accept that someone will never be the same as they once were, putting down your suffering dog, the bone-stretching growing pains while lying in your middle school bed at 3 AM. It feels like I’ve ached through a great deal of that sort of growing in recent years, in that same sense: that growth is often painful, yet essential. 

What they don’t tell you about entering your mid to late twenties is the heap of emotional weight you suddenly bear as your frontal lobe fully develops, plopping all your demons and skeletons front and center for you to deal with amidst the rest of your shiny new adult responsibilities. Never Before Seen, Never Again Found found me tangled in uncomfortable growth, and even though it’s an emotionally painful listen, it’s completely necessary. The album is vulnerable in every way that I hope to be, airing out tumult with grief, religion, and identity. Arm’s Length crafted an all-timer in this one– a modern day Home, Like No Place Is There– with not a single skippable track in sight. This is the type of album that you put on at your lowest; to go blow-for-blow with your dread. It’s strange that we tend to listen to sad music when we’re sad. Perhaps we need to simmer in the sorrow and wallow in the bad luck before we can rise and ask ourselves, “Is it just my luck?” 
– Brandon Cortez


Basque – Pain Without Hope Of Healing

No Funeral Records

Released March 22, 2024

When compiling a list like this, I am stressed. My favorite albums, even my favorite favorite albums, are often a moving target. Like a sequestered pond hosting a slew of migratory birds, the songs I become most passionate about are subject to climate, to season, to temperature. One flock leaves as soon as June hits 98°, another to arrive when a fall sunset triggers a wistful memory. So even though the last ten years have hosted an almost uncountable number of classic, iconic, and incredible albums, I am beholden to my obsession of the past year; this flight of fancy that has consumed me fully. And perhaps next year I’ll think myself insane for believing it, but the final Basque album is effectively perfect from start to finish. An unreal meditation on the agony of self-loathing, the album's lyrical despondency would feel too much if every performance on it weren’t a pitch-perfect match. With vocals that howl and shriek in perfect tempo, guitars turn on a dime while bouncing and wailing, a bass that hammers like knuckles to plaster, and what has to be one of the greatest drum performances ever put to record in this genre. Pain Without Hope of Healing is easily one of the finest screamo records of the last decade.
– Elias Amini

Swim Into The Stats

Hello, and welcome to the nerdy part after the article where we talk about STATISTICS. Think of this like the scene that plays after the credits–a fun little bonus for the real heads that want to stick around. This is a spiritual successor to something we published at the end of last year called “Swim Into The Stats.” While that article focused almost exclusively on 2024 in review, we are now shifting to look at the entirety of this blog’s run over the last decade. Thanks to Braden Allmond for wrangling all this data and rendering these spiffy charts; it’s a trip to see this website’s history condensed in such a visual way. 

First, here are all the articles we've published over the last decade, displayed as a noodlepoint scatter plot with a different color for each year. It’s cool to see this rise (more or less) year after year as I began to take the site more seriously and also feature more contributors. It's also interesting to see my life in the gaps, such as moving across the country in the fall of 2023 or absconding from all responsibility in July 2024. 

This git-style plot shows a grey box for every day in the last decade, and a blue box for every day Swim posted. It makes sense that Friday is usually spoken for, given that’s when new music releases and we like to be of the moment whenever possible. You can also see my commitment over the last couple years to not really post anything on the weekends. 

Focusing just on 2025 for a bit, it feels like we’re moving at a pretty steady clip. Most of these are reviews, which makes sense, but I like seeing the interviews, features, and roundups strategically scattered throughout. 

Examining the number of unique authors in this bar chart is probably the easiest way to illustrate how collaborative this site has become. Sure, it’s still me running this thing, editing and wrangling reviews, but it’s all the beautiful, lovely people above (and throughout our ten years) that have brought a wealth of voices, perspectives, and tastes to the forefront. 

Finally, let’s end with some dessert. This delicious pie chart shows a breakdown of total articles by year. It’s wild to see 2024 taking up over a quarter, but other than that (and a slender 2015 and 2016 as we got off the ground), everything else feels pretty evenly split.

Finally…

There ya have it. Ten years of albums from our esteemed Swim Team, some retrospective charts to show off our growth, and a whole lotta gratitude on my part. I’ll just say it again, especially if you made it this far, but thank you for being here. I love music, and running this website is just something that makes sense to my brain. I gotta get this adoration out somewhere, and the fact that anyone reads this regularly, contributes, or cares in any way is a little bit brain-breaking to me. 

Whether you’ve been reading for years or are totally new, thank you for being here, and thank you for helping us get here. Here’s to Ten Years of Swim.