We typically bring you monthly roundups of the best videos we come across – and you seem to like ’em, as they comprise one of the more popular series on The Bad Penny. But lately we’ve noticed an increasing number of artists going full throttle and making longer, more fully realized (and presumably more expensive) short films to accompany their music. Here are the best 10 we’ve found in recent months:
1. Deafheaven‘s “Hunter” (released 10.9.26)
2. Caspian‘s “A Great Fire” (released 10.16.26)
Mastodon and Deafheaven let it riff in Garden City, Idaho, last night – a stone’s throw away from Boise, with the two metal bands at the topic of their game and finally touring on the same bill.
Here are some the images from the action-packed concert:
There isn’t a fine line between bands that get drawn into improv jamming as if Charybdis were beside them and acts that play consummately complex music while following sheet music they spent thousands of hours writing and revising. The line is about three feet thick.
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More doppelgängers here.
The Bad Penny‘s friends at Veil of Sound have assembled a nifty 2025 recap that encompasses the records, concerts and other highlights that the German website’s 10 contributors enjoyed the most last year. Check it out here.
Lonely People with Power delivers a punch that will leave listeners reeling deliriously. Deafheaven’s new record restores Clarke’s black-metal screeches—sometimes at their most ear-shattering yet—while also producing the punchiest hard-rock riffs proliferating the band’s arsenal. Read my new review at Knotfest.com–and also don’t miss my FLOOD interview with frontman George Clarke about Lonely People with Power, as well as my analysis of Deafheaven’s 2017 tour set lists and first-ever show in Boise.
Don’t miss these two other roundups either:
• Friends of The Bad Penny Share Their Top 10 Lists of 2025 Best Albums
• Boise Friends of The Bad Penny Share Their 2025 Top 10 Lists
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 fifth and final batch. (Go here for The Bad Penny‘s favorite albums, #11 through #20; here for #21 through #30; here for #31 through #40; and here for #41 through #50.)
1. Deafheaven – Lonely People With Power (Roadrunner)
• Deafheaven Frontman Dives Deep Into Each Song on New LP
• From the Vault: Deafheaven’s 2017 Tour Setlists and First-Ever Show in Boise – An Analysis
2. Orbit Culture – Death Above Life (Century Media)
• Orbit Culture Try To Keep Momentum Going With Next LP
Continue readingThanks to Post-Trash for posting my top 20 favorite records of the year as part of its staff picks roundup.
The Bad Penny is rolling out its favorite albums of 2025 in five installments this year, with the first and second batches having already dropped. While the other three will plop down imminently, we’re smashing the self-indulgence and monotony by inviting some of our favorite industry folks to share their own top 10s with us and, by extension, you.
To warn off any complaints about corruption, misdealing or the coveted line in the sand between journalists and press folks, we laid down a strict ground rule: PR reps were not allowed to include any of their clients, past or present, on their lists.
We’re delighted by the picks that the participants received, as they run the genre gamut and include many albums of which The Bad Penny wasn’t even aware. Especially striking is that, among the combined 160 titles chosen by the … let’s dust off the old calculator here … 16 contributors, a tiny fraction appear on more than one list: Pixel Grip, Deafheaven, Clipse and Primitive Man. And each of those titles are only listed twice.
Thanks oodles to Tim Anderl of Sweet Cheetah PR, Caroline Borolla of Clarion Call Media, Brendan Bourke of The Syn, Dave Clifford of US/THEM Group, George Corona III of Terrorbird Media, Bruno Dorella and Stefania Pedretti of OvO, Brandon Gallagher of Trace Amount, Eddie Gobbo of Something Is Waiting, Austin Griswold of Secret Service Publicity, McKeever and Gosteffects of Heavy Halo, Curran Reynolds of Body Stuff (and The Chain), Michel Rowland of UTM Music Group, Justin Sinkovich of Solid Brass Records, Dan Volohov of Discipline PR, James Woodard of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy and Will Yarbrough of Season of Mist – not only for taking the time and care to craft such thoughtful top 10s and share them, but helping this website triple its UVs this year over last – and provide critical support to yours truly over the course of a 28-year career as a music journalist, rock critic and soon-to-be-lobotomized AI automaton.
Without further ado, here are the lists of the top 10 albums released in 2025 that some of The Bad Penny‘s favorite publicists and musicians graciously shared with us.
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