What makes Strange Passage from Somerville, Massachusetts, strange in the raddest of ways is that their take on psych-rock is tight and precise, and their songs are well considered from melody and flow to texture and tone. Read my full Treble review here.
A lot of fucked-up up shit happened in the U.S. this year. Way, way too much of it. For many of us Americans who actually carry values in our hearts instead of bloviating about them or slapping bumper stickers on our monster trucks, it was almost too much to bear.
Fortunately, 2025 also saw the release of a staggering number of stellar records, which made the year a little more … well, bearable. Hence, for the first time ever, The Bad Penny is deviating from its usual annual tradition of limiting out favorite listens to just 10 and breaking them into a five-part series containing 10 records per installment.
What follows is the first batch.
41. Sharon Van Etten – & the Attachment Theory (Jagjaguwar)
Whatever you were expecting from a solo album by A Perfect Circle and Zwan collaborator Paz Lenchantin, you won’t be prepared for what you hear when you press play. Read my full review of Lenchantin’s Triste at Veil of Sound, one of Germany’s premiere sources for alternative, experimental and heavy music, with a particular predilection for post-rock, black metal and krautrock.
Strapped for cash but hungry for great music? You won’t have much luck camping out at the grocery store these days; Bandcamp is a way better destination. Here’s a rundown of 10 rad releases, about half of them newly released, that The Bad Penny recently came across on Bandcamp.
(Note: If you do have some green to spare, please show your thanks to these deserving artists and labels.)
1. Rose of the World‘s Heaven Is a Broken Heart (Sad Cactus)
It’s audacious for an NYC hipper-than-thou band to craft its first LP in the style of Sunny Day Real Estate. Those old codgers have not only come and gone but come and gone again, and then a third time. Hell, even most of their protégés have melted away at this point too. To their enormous credit, Rose of the World has pulled off a maneuver worthy of the Olympic Games with this catchy keepsake of a record. Just released on November 12, snag Heaven Is a Broken Heart before those who can make money off realize that palm-against-forehead revelation and start charging 18 bucks for it.
HEAVEN IS A BROKEN HEART by Rose of the World
Continue reading
—
It’s a bright Saturday in L.A., and while throngs left town to get their holiday on elsewhere, the hipper masses stuck around to suck in the Save Our State Parks festival. A three-stage charity throwdown designed to offset the ever-looming California budget cuts, it’s taking place at the Los Angeles State Historic Park and featuring just about every “now” band you can name.
We’re talking Wavves, No Age and other frequenters of the Smell. We’re talking Dillinger Escape Plan, Converge, Torche and other smart metal bands that don’t have long hair. We’re talking Black Lips, the Thermals, Lightning Bolt and acts every other indie-rock blog out there is also yapping about. And to top it all off, Tim and Eric – they of Adult Swim fame – are conspiring to do something weird for 40 minutes.
We’re about to head off to the fest, and we’re going to try to pull off this while live-blogging thing, for the first time, at a show. We don’t know how the cell phone reception will be up there, we probably won’t be able to upload imagery till later on – hell, we’re not even sure if this is going to work. But if you wish you were going where we’re going, maybe you’ll want to pop over to the IndiePit Blog throughout the day, ’cause if we can actually pull off this experiment, it could be cool.
All right, enough dilly-dallying, Sally Salami. Time to get to the show, or we’ll be late.
Continue reading
The Darkness played a gig in Boise on Saturday night, and as to be expected, the always-entertaining British rockers delivered plenty of theatrics and pleased the crowd to virtually no end.
In what appears to be the Darkness’ first-ever concert in Idaho, frontman Justin Hawkins hammed it up in front of the packed crowd at the Knitting Factory Boise. He leaned hard into the glam-rock swagger that made the band stand out from the pack of detached fashionista indie rockers in the early aughts.
To that end, the Darkness tapped heavily into their 2003 debut, Permission to Land; six of the 20 songs they played derived from that record: “Get Your Hands Off My Woman,” “I Believe in a Thing Called Love,” “Growing on Me,” “Givin’ Up,” “Love Is Only a Feeling” and “Friday Night.”
Continue reading
Snooper have all the support they need to be taken seriously, with Third Man Records serving as chaperone for the band and its second record, as Jack White’s label did with their first two years ago. That said, the operators of the label appear to have removed the training wheels from Snooper’s bike this time around, letting them embrace their id on the band’s second record in defiance of the dreaded-slash-silly “sophomore curse.” Read my Post-Trash review here.
With Uncrossing the Keys, Wode proved they wanted to make a daring pivot, at risk of alienating black-metal purists, by benching those two trademark qualities of theirs in favor of a far more eclectic listen—an objective at which they succeed handily. On Uncrossing the Keys, Wode finally makes good use of the huge asset of which they didn’t take full advantage in the past: three guitars. Rather than mostly playing in unison, this time around, vocalist M. Czerwoniuk and his fellow axemen—T. Horrocks (who also plays drums and keys) and backing vocalist D. Shaw—engage in intricate interplay for the bulk of the record. The Pittsburgh metalheads’ coal-black alchemy results in an album with more melody than all Wode’s previous albums combined. And that’s really saying something, considering that their debut was one of my favorite albums of 2016. Read my full Treble review.
Not a second is wasted on this essential entry into the collection of every fan of heavy music who doesn’t like Disturbed and Korn. With that notion in mind, it’s no surprise that one of the most persnickety-yet-always-correct individuals in this sludgy underworld, Aaron Turner, gave Erosion his sign of approval by putting out Maximum Suffering seven years ago. Invasive Species comes courtesy of Canadian underground grindcore label Mechanized Apparatus Revolt, and boy did they luck out scoring this release. Get it here and thank us later — if your head hasn’t exploded by the time you’re done listening to it. Here’s my full Post-Trash review.
Agriculture, the self-categorized “ecstatic black metal” outfit, returns with a second album that is called The Spiritual Sound and is just as singular and spectacular as their debut. Read my FLOOD review.
The Bad Penny (beta) 