With the proverbial curtain of 2025 thankfully drawing to a close, Week in Pop provides a fleeting snapshot of some of the artists that made this year manageable and out of the deluge of madness—dare we say inspirational. Forever never concerned with hierarchal systems of ranking and the like; this feature stands as a humble work in progress that highlights a handful of the creatives that kept us engaged in the collective spirit of humanity. Never intended to leave anyone behind, but rather cast a bit of shine on just some of our favorites in pseudo-chronological order. So now without further ado it is our pleasure and utmost privilege to proudly present:

Week in Pop’s Year in Pop 2025:

Get Lost Cassidy Frost

The pop praxis of Cassidy Frost; press photo courtesy of the artist.

Presenting a succinct collection of songs that were, according to the artist all written on cold nights for lost loves — San Francisco based tunesmith, media mover, producer, visionary, Get Lost Cassidy Frost presents the intimate expressions that make up Live in Private released through Seattle imprint Puzz Records. The awaited debut solo album from the artist, Cassidy delivers an assortment of songs that were recorded in one take where their inception and articulation were all created in real time. Following up some of our favorite tunes from 2024, Cassidy Frost continues to make music that speaks to the parts of the self that are the most guarded. Ultra visceral vignettes that sting like the abandoned love letters that remain unsent, the feelings that stir us in ways that words by themselves cannot fully convey, the people who capture the whole of our attention, how we process love, how we process the ones that got away, the ways in which love stirs us, surprises us, the memories made, the memories forgotten, and all the memories that have yet to be made. [see also “Like I Did Before”]

Ella Hue

Offering nearly nine minutes of visceral deliverance from the continuous quagmires of the world (both at home and abroad) is the long anticipated visual from Ella Hue for “War” (Round). Featured off their fall 2023 release Magnet from Team Love, Hue unleashes a visual epic to echo into the chasms of the ages courtesy of Natasha Heaszl, Lee Ordway Maps, with choreography by Devin Fulton, and costume design by Molly Minot Hubley. The Ojai artist elevates the punk poetics in the face of power as an introspective endeavor to asses the wars that rage inside of us, to the ones that occur on a cellular level, the battles within our own home communities, to the even larger clashes that define the frail fabrics of domestic civics, alongside the inverted operas that transpire on the geopolitical stage of world theatre.

simmcat

On the heels of soaring through the existential expanses on the lifted head spaces of “What is Real”, simmcat ventures deep into the heartlands of vulnerability on “Always”. The moniker of Italian artist Simona Catalani shares a sweet swaying string dream from the album I Heard She Lost You via WWNBB that follows up the debut Thought I Was Dreaming. Catalani carefully weaves chamber chansons that move from the deepest senses of the soul and into the uncharted outer realms.

MAN LEE

In a whirl of thought and sound is MAN LEE with the debut of “Wind”. The Brooklyn based duo of Sam Reichman and Tim Lee follow up their recent treatise on the modern malaise “Celery” with musings on nature, the meanings we apply to the spaces that strike our interests, the magnitude of the world through the lens of memory and so much more. Working in conjunction with producer Arthur Moon, “Wind” breezes through the remnants of places we have known while traversing through the annals of time to the modern day states of longing, desires, wants, and needs. Featured off the upcoming debut album Hefty Wimpy arriving March 7, Reichman & Lee make music for today’s dreamers that yearn dearly for something outside the tired regiments and indoctrinated routines that are suited to serve the status quo of late capitalism’s mechanically engineered orchestrations (and functions).

Myriads

Debuting a song for sleepless lovers is Myriads with “5 a.m.” where the midnight movements are met with the sunrise beam signals of daybreak. Featured off the forthcoming Find Ourselves Again, Portland artist Maria DeHart follows up the 2023 EP Win Some, Lose Everyone with songs that center on the human connection. The ties that bind us to loved ones, the threads that reconnect and center us to our inner-selves, and the ways in which we discover newfound energies and inspirations in others and our surrounding communities. Maria makes music about what it feels like to find love, channeling the thrills, excitement, the tinges of anxiety, ecstasy, and enthralled sentiments that defy descriptors of becoming lost in the presence of someone that we are falling truly, madly, deeply, and ultimately head over heels for.

Hectorine

Presenting Arrow of Love, the new album by Hectorine. The latest chapter in a lauded and revered pop oeuvre that follows up Live at Lost Church, Tears, and the self-titled — Sarah immerses the audience in the chansons that float between worlds alongside fellow creative visionaries Geoff Saba, Max Shanley, Jon Wujcik, Joel Robinow, Betsy Gran, J.J. Golden, et al. It is no hyperbole to describe this album as one of the year’s most anticipated release in the Bay, a collection of industrial symphonies that traverse the under-worlds and outer-worlds of the most intimate realms of our own personal communities and consciousness.

Alexi Belchere (Gloomy June, Nocean Beach, et al.)

Bay Area fields forever & Alexi Belchere; photographed by @play_w_cc.

Gloomy June is a collaborative journey to draw upon the connections that make us feel a strong sense of empathy, just as the solo and singular vision of Nocean Beach is a celebration of self-examination, actualization, exploration, and acceptance. Alexi entertains the constructs of the ego and super ego as two sides of the same coin, a drive to create the most catchy and meaningful songs that centers the spirit and cultivates the importance of communities. A polymath who seems to be everywhere in the Bay Area all at once, we present the latest creative developments from the artist who further delves into an array of influential constructs that are key to the engine of their unrelenting volition. [see also Gloomy June’s “Kill You”]

eggcorn

Entering into the fray of dissecting these polar dualities is Vallejo, CA artist eggcorn with the debut of the fiery and fierce “Hitler Was a Vegetarian”. The Bay Area band based on the pensive perceptions of Lara Hoffman scours the human psyche in a Jungian flight of frightening fancy to understand the good and bad that exists at the savage heart and core of the individual. Featured on the album Observer Effect, Lara follows up Your One True Love with songs that wade into waters that confront the contradictions and abundance of complications that are rife within the messiness of the human condition. Moving toward the closed corridors of chamber championed trajectories that tread through the troves of interior examinations and actualization of the soul; “Vegetarian” grasps at a better understanding of the cogs, coils, and chaos that comprises everything that makes us who we are as people.

Softie

This year saw a barrage of song sketches, works in progress and more from Oakland-based visionary Nicholas Coleman of Softie, featuring singles "Gauzy", "Don't Look Down", created in collaborations amongst friends and fellow creatives. And while those mythic recordings, as of the writing of this feature, currently remain unreleased: they might very well be part of yet to be disclosed larger project. Those big bright tones can be heard within the raging roar of the new single "Kiss Kiss Kiss". Like the magnificent experimentations of ten thousand feet waves of dissonance with expressive intention found on the beloved debut Strong Hold; Coleman shakes up the conventions of infinite possibilities again with the monumental Somersault via Cherub Dream Records. Featuring a strong collaborative showing from longtime friends from fellow beloved acts such as Buddy Junior, Christina's Trip, Figure Eight, Fitting, H. Salt, My Pet Fossil, engineering/mixing by Brad Lincoln, and mastering by Curt Walls; the next level of the Softie vision is realized in full at Deathbed Studios in a recording that shakes the rafters of heaven in lantern shatters of celestial sunlight.

Monte Lately

In pushes for those elusive better days, we find inspiration in the voices and arts that emerge from the deafening clamor of the crowds. A newfound source of inspiration is SF’s Monte Lately who caused a ripple with the vulnerable beauty and pop bravado of “Pity the Fool”. A new arrival to the Bay scenes, “Pity” is a lavish and loud anthem that exists in the languid spaces of breathy bedroom bop to big stage sensuality. The sleepy, and sinewy lo-fi lyrical lattice textures climb upward to tree tops that find new degrees of clarity and confidence that shines like a well-lit sky path to celestial places.

On the debut of “Fever Dreams”, Monte Lately excavates the resounding effects of loss through all of the eras and exploring the impacts across the catacombs of consciousness. When the everything doesn’t make sense, the tendency is to venture into the recesses of ourselves and learned schools of logic to rediscover and reconnect to the grounding foundations of reason. Sometimes, often times this is a task better posited than accomplished.

The Pennys

In the spirit of the Bay's marathon of prominence and aspirational ubiquity — Mike Ramos and R.E. Seraphin unveil the anticipated self-titled of their collaborative pop clique — The Pennys. Formed out of sessions for Ray's solo work at Mike's Bernal Heights flat, the duo expanded their collaboration to include fellow local mainstays Yea-Ming Chen (of Ye-Ming & the Rumours, Ryli), Owen Kelley (previously of Sleepy Sun), and Luke Robbins (formerly of Latitude, as well as Ryli).

The simpatico nature of these collaborations are a no-brainer given the creative cross-sections of connections between all the involved artists. Witnessed here is a captured kind of magic that is one of the most exciting things the Bay hasn’t really heard since the halcyon, hopeful, and restless days of 2009. A time where you could easily bounce between Bottom of the Hill, Eagle Tavern, Hemlock, Hotel Utah, Rickshaw, etc and catch the like of the Fresh & Onlys, Girls, the Sandwitches, Sonny & the Sunsets, Weekend, and countless other local phenoms. Given the current tight bonds shared by many in the local communities, a new era of collectives and cooperatives have emerged between the East Bay, SF, to the southern and northern Bay networks. There is something ecstatic that is happening here, and the momentum has only but begun an unstoppable showcasing of talents in a prolific parade of wonder works that feature contributions from some of the most inspired imaginations.

Yoh

The year of Yoh; press photo courtesy of the artist.

Presenting the debut of the new album Leaning for Youngbloods, Yoh leans further into themselves. From taking leaps of faith into new environments, discovering a greater love, working in new mediums, and accepting new personal challenges; Leaning showcases the artist moving into higher streams of creative movements and exploring even richer textures and lyrical textiles of sound. Self-produced by Yoh, the album offers a privy adventure into new worlds where the visceral and meditative operate on parallel planes of elaborate expression energized with the percolating heartbeats of life.

Cautious Clay

Delivering a brand new conceptual work orchestrated to the tick of dawn’s rising clock is The Hours: Morning for Concord Records. Recorded after making the move from Brooklyn to Philadelphia, Cautious Clay’s latest odyssey witnesses the motions and trajectories that transpire at the beginning of a new day. The event of daybreak glides with a demure, intoxicated glee like a late amorous evening turned into a soiree that soars past a planned wake-up call on "Tokyo Lift (5am)". That early morning-after energy breaks like nascent sunrays of light on the heart ripping romanticism of "No Champagne (6am)", that turns the hazy tilt-a-whirl of thoughts during rush hour into a big center stage stealing number on "Traffic (7am)". The classic Cautious Clay sound can be experienced on full sparkling display with the driven vision a.m. jogging "The Plot (8am)" that joyously races ahead like the rapid firing thoughts in the runner's theatre of the frontal cortex.

Fitting

Sacramento band Fitting present their new album Stable Vices, titled after the concept of cooped-up equestrian idleness; Greta, Eli, Joey, and Phil deliver a conscious rocking rebellion against those institutions of inertia found in our shared ecosystems and communities of unrelenting reality. Like the relatable sentiments and sensational snapshots that strive to convey the many moods and emotions of modern existence experienced on their lauded album Minutes; Fitting further mines the places where formative memories meet larger picture concepts.

Pax

In the mix with Pax; press photo courtesy of the artist.

Los Angeles-based bedroom pop boffin Pax has mystified the musical undergrounds for years. With a career spanning over a decade, the elusive musician [fka Pictochat] has made a name for themselves as your favorite artist’s favorite artist with countless genre-defying tracks. With an oeuvre spanning releases like leaving, Sophomore, melo.grano, lookbook [french house tape], cherry: outtakes, a holiday album with TV Blonde, Because We're Old, CAMDOG, Tricot, Hazards! & more — Pax presents an east meets the Pacific west discotheque with the island aura of Bermuda.

The new album Bermuda brings a new retro batch of funk and disco that spans across the globe, and expertly trips into different dimensions of time and space. Kicking it off with "Cairo", Pax commands rhythms and keys that dance into a variety of decidedly demure movements and moments that sparkle like that elusive holiday in the sun that you have always wanted. The ultra chic of "San Francisco Disco" is the perfect head bopping number that you want to hear while hitting up your favorite café in the Mission, with a slick and smart style that will transport anyone listening in the world to a bespoke Bay Area natural wine salon replete with obscure vintage wax spinning on the platters. Featuring vocals from TV Blonde, the dreamy vacation vernaculars carries over on to the title track that drifts off to North Atlantic coordinates to explore parts unknown, uncharted, and all around intriguing. "Domino" gradually kicks up the party to the full hilt of a Friday night at a beloved local haunt that makes even the most humble neighborhood dive feel like the most rustic and wondrous watering hole located somewhere in the opposite corner of the world.

Ryli

Ryli arrives like a soaring dove heralding the arrival of a sun-beaming solstice, riding down the UV solar ray slides like the descent of Icarus returning to the cradle of charred earth. Presenting the eagerly anticipated album Come and Get Me: Yea-Ming, Rob Good, Luke Robbins & Ian McBrayer provide ample further evidence of the Bay Area's current creative streak of unstoppable proliferation and collaborations. Philosophies of togetherness, extoling the principles and powers of banding together, combining talents to make a sound of serendipity and an impactful synergistic connect that synthesizes styles into airwaves that broadcast near and far.

Come and Get Me fights the fears that keep us anxiously awake afterhours with pursuits toward places of purpose, prosperity, and points of reason. Opening with “Medicine Speed”, Ryli takes the listener on the rollercoaster of the late night thoughts that toss and turn to find a comfort that shines brighter than an electric nightlight. Yea-Ming’s organic, earnest, and iconic delivery in conjunction with Good’s crisp chiming tones, in hand with McBrayer & Robbins rhythm section that altogether ventures into the foray of freakbeat favorites that pioneered the the no waves and new waves all the movements with post as the prefix.

Omo Cloud

Embarking upon the journey to feeling whole again is San Diego artist Omo Cloud, the moniker of Cole De La Isla. Presenting a first listen to their album Mausoleum courtesy of Dusty Mars Records / Silver Girl Records; the artist works through the youthful traumas that have shattered themselves personally, along with their faith in systems of belief and the character of society at large. In hand with the perils experienced by them (and all of us) during the pandemic, Mausoleum smashes the boulder stones of a cold crypt for something ethereal, eternal, and all out transcendental in ambition, vision, and execution. Cole orchestrates ballads in ways that are unique, unusual, and fascinating in their forms, arrangement, and heartbreaking honesty. It’s an album that confront sobering realities in a sweeping assembly of moving forward whilst putting the pieces of themselves together again on a road of personal discovery, and recovery.

Sex Week

Searches for substance, sincerity, and sensuality amidst modern society's inescapable deluge of smog-cast skies, polluted ecosystems, broken civics, and such is a breathless search and rescue mission in the name of respite. Flooded zones of natural disasters, climate decay, executive edicts of incessant entropy, undermined states, targeted vulnerable groups, social breakdowns, and countless other calamities cause further rifts that further rip people further and further apart from each other. Shining an inviting, beguiling, brightly burning lighthouse lantern red glow amid the ever-present fogs of smoky, manufactured fear is Brooklyn duo Pearl Amanda Dickson and Richard Orofino presenting the Upper Mezzanine EP. The follow-up to last year’s self-titled EP finds the duo building upon their debut with a sound styled for the world’s loftiest stages that can make vast, expansive spaces feel secluded and intimate (and vice versa).

Time Thief

Providence, RI based artists Zoë Wyner and James Walsh as they present their latest collaboration as Time Thief. Announcing their self-titled debut via Lost Sound Tapes and Musical Fanzine: the duo present the debut of “bus song” that chronicles the changes made by the developer class and the political set determined to redistrict and reduce preexisting socioeconomic ecosystems with little care for communities in a lower tax bracket. Having previously collaborated together in the band Dump Him, together as Time Thief they make music with heart and spirit in the faces of those that seek to alter worlds with little to no input from those that are the most affected by such seismic and callous shifts.

Liz Melina Godoy Nieto

The movements and madness of desire and determination rage ahead on “Esa Avaricia” from creative powerhouse Liz Melina Godoy Nieto. Having received an arts grant from the Arts Council of England last year, the currently UK-based multi-hyphenate shares a hyper Banda single that sprints madly like a racetrack runner trying to be the best bet yet. Like the previous single “Display”, Liz orchestrates traditional Sinaloense horns in radically rhythmic sequences that blare like prosodic klaxons for all to heed and feel.

Mini Golf Water Feature

Introducing Mini Golf Water Feature, from Tacoma, Washington with the debut album Discography 2024-2025. The band’s first proper physical release, courtesy of DIY stalwarts Musical Fanzine; it includes works from their previous digital releases putt, Crop Circles, Stupid Car, as well as a host of new material. The quartet of Nat Peterman, Audrey White, Ollie Nattrass, and Nick Pollock make music to accompany the modern condition of pervasive maladies, ennui, exhaustion, consumption for the sake of consumption, the veracity of vehicular venerations, and a bevy of emotively imbued observations. Rolling out the terroir driven mouth of gravel and mulch is the premiere of “Dirt Eater” from one of the most entertaining, exciting, and beloved surprise releases of 2025.

Kadhja Bonet

Doing the work is Toronto’s shining star Kadhja Bonet who rolls out the debut of “Transistor” off the new EP Battlewear. The rustic cycle of demos follows up 2018’s Childqueen and The Visitor from 2016 that turns up the urgency for a more intensified degree of care and caution as we all collectively navigate the terrain of these brave new worlds. While the existential and very real threats against the LBTQ+ communities, minority groups, and other vulnerable folks are nothing new: the active menace to reduce, silence, and oppress all perceived opposition and dissenting peoples is happening on a scale that defies measure. Bonet brings a sound forged out of armor, building testaments not merely out of defense against the indefensible regressive trends that abound but as a way to break through with hope for an enlightened epoch of equality, empathy, and constructive actualization.

Weekend Lovers

One of Tucson’s top bands Weekend Lovers rolled out their anticipated new album In Your Dreams. Lead by the iconic and mighty Marta DeLeon (previously of the New York and Seattle scenes), with guitarist Dane Velazquez, and percussionist Rick Bailey; the trio present their biggest album of expansive consciousness where the interior/exterior of experience becomes blended and blurred. Recorded by Steven Lee Tracy at St. Cecilia Studios with mastering by Dana Fehr, In Your Dreams beautifully articulates the heart and spirit of these strange times with a tight orchestration and assembly built upon the pop cultural canons of the latter 20th century institutions.

Slugfeast

Introducing Slugfeast, the Sacramento/Davis/Bay Area trio of Alejandro Magallan, Claire Tauber, and Lucas Wieser who discuss their self-titled album from Cherub Dream Records. Recorded at Deathbed Recording in Oakland with an engineering/mastering assist from Brad Lincoln: Slugfeast present the culmination of their collaborations that have spanned across the past couple years along the western edges of interstate 80. For all of the jaded hearts of the universe, this is the record that will have you falling in love with rock & roll once again. A record that will redefine the worlds that DIY musings can build. A reminder of those fraught balances of beauty and boldness in a harsh and brutal world. A reminder of the power of friendship, and the infinite outlets of expression that fly forward on the wings of inspiration with the power to arrive at new echelons of understanding and artistic enlightenment.

Giant Day

Giant Day delivered the urgent new album Alarm from the Elephant 6 collective. The duo of Derek Almstead (from Elf Power, The Glands, of Montreal, The Olivia Tremor Control, etcetera) and Emily Growden (of Marshmallow Coast, Faster Circuits) ring the bells that strike with tones of high alert, and an even higher degree of ethereality. Having made the move from Athens to a family farm in Pennsylvania; they follow up Glass Narcissus with a timely record of warning that is just as urgent as it approaches the dawn treading gates of the ephemeral. The two together combine their talents in the face of the threats to our democracy, our worlds, our humanity, all through the power of song that examines everything from the material, spiritual, and supernatural scales of comprehension and manifestation.

Kate de Rosset

In this spirit of healing, humanity, and spiritual growth is the glorious new song "What Wish" from the musical pop painter of new ages, newer waves and new-new romantics Kate de Rosset. Featured on the new album It Will Burn arriving in the new year from La Double Vie: the sentiment and expressive intent is one that reaches toward higher grounds and places of unbridled bliss and thanksgiving. It Will Burn acknowledges the torrid and roughshod ways the material realm moves in all of its uncompromising, obstinate, and unconscionable manners of self-serving, short-sighted pigheadedness. Kate shares a series of meditations that lend more than merely coping with the catastrophes that exceed the limitations of singular control and finds the things that bring greater degrees of meaning and deliverance from an otherwise fleeting society of questionable stability that forever finds itself flirting with the drain circling whirlpool trajectories of entropy.

a.gris

Alex Delamard of Hoorsees embarks upon a solo endeavor of economic maximalism; press photo courtesy of the artist.

Addressing the states of our disconnection and deviations is French artist Alex Delamard of Hoorsees, launching the solo project a.gris with the debut of “oblivion 2025”. Taken off the upcoming EP Gris slated for 2026 via the esteemed Parisian imprint Géographie: Alex channels the sum of his creative visions into a vacuum of sound where every chord and note reverberates with a loud and uncanny degree of resonance. It bids farewell to the inexplicably logic defying year of incomprehensible insanity and regressive movements with intoxicating overtures that manifests electro angels and gods in the machines that may descend like mythic spirits set on saving us from ourselves.

Still Ruins

Presenting the prismatic luster of Still Ruins’ new single “Our Penance”, out now via à La Carte Records. The successor to their self-titled album, the valiant trio of Frankie Soto, Jose Medina and Cyrus VandenBerghe continue to combine the sum of their talents, bands, projects, and creative visions into a new venerable vanguard of lush pop nobles. From Frankie and Jose's Balearic dream designs in Surf Club, to the weaving of textural tomorrows found in Cyrus' Welcome Strawberry: together they fuse sophistipop fantasias that can be felt like synthesizer phantasmagorias of the sentimental and sublime.

…and so many more…

Keep up with all of our features from this past year and beyond here.

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