my favorite overall of 2025
Balloonerism now on streaming
Is rock back? Geese's Getting Killed says yes
Rosalia's Lux rewrites what pop can be
Comethazine rebrands as jazz musician Frank Kole
It was inevitable for Mac Miller's 2014 scrapped album, Baloonerism, to come to streaming. With recent releases of other mixtapes like Joey Badass's 1999 and Travis Scott's Days Before Rodeo coming to streaming platforms after an over decade long wait, it only made sense for this to be next. Written around the time of his Faces mixtape, the unreleased songs from the album were popular in leaked-music circles since they started coming out. After his untimely death in 2018, this seems to be the last of his estate, rounding off a near perfect posthumous release of his music.
Cameron Winter and Geese made their mark on the indie sleaze revival, putting it in the mainstream with Getting Killed. The project is more of a full band effort than previous projects. The intro track, "Trinidad", sets this up with a cacophony of guitars, drums and Winter's grimy voice always returning to the phrase "There's a bomb in my car." Its the perfect set up for the rest of the album, from there it bounces between indie rock, experimental rock and alt rock to create an album that sends hope the genre is still being innovated. Their touring mate "Racing Mount Pleasant" further cements rock's future in a different side of the genre with their most recent self-titled album — modern rock is in good hands.
The people upset with the choice of Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl cannot find out about Rosalia's Lux. The breakout from Rosalia features lyrics in thirteen languages ranging from her native Spanish to Ukranian to Japanese to Hebrew. "I belong to the world," she told Popcast in an interview after Lux's release. The songs diversity, doesn't just stop at language use. Songs on the album can range from elegantly sang, bare-bones pop, to full-on orchestral production on tracks. Rosalia has never been afraid to take risks, and it seems on Lux she asks the listener, "Why can't I just do it all?" Delivering on this, there's is something on this album for everyone whether its found in the lyrics or the instrumentation, you really can't go wrong.
Oklou's participatory debut choke enough
Oklou's debut is truly what you make it. Every time I've listened to this album since its released its meant something different to me — that's the beauty of it. Depending on my mood, time of the day or things going on in my life, the album changes. Its a different experience everytime, an aspect that has kept me returning to this album again and again and again. The title track of the album, "choke enough" united pop fans across spaces, but songs like "want to wanna come back," "family and friends" and "take me by the hand" are filled with an unspecific melancholy no other album this year made me feel.
If you ran one million simulations of 2025 in a butterfly effect-esque experiment, I don't think any of the simulations would have culminated in the development of Frank Kole (formerly known as Comethazine) the jazz musician. The ex-XXL freshman famous for one of the worst verses (an impressive feat) in the magazine's series history released a video of playing "Autumn Leaves." The song, most famous in the USA from Nat King Cole's performance, is a jazz standard thousands of musicians have versions of, but none more expected than Frank Kole's. While not a jazz aficionado, I'm excited to see where Frank Kole career is headed, something I can't believe I'm saying about the artists formerly known as Comethazine.