Follow all our Best of 2025 coverage (along with previous year-end lists) here.
Hip-hop oldies become jazz instrumentals. Cult folk songs become grand spaghetti-western soundscapes. Blink-182 hits become DIY bedroom jams. We’ve got ’90s hardcore bangers shredded on acoustic guitar, Spanglish Latin-pop takes on Air Supply and Elvis, and, maybe most outrageously of all, a wild experiment in turning everyone from Chappell Roan to Smash Mouth into emo/screamo.
It’s an especially unruly set this year, but a rewarding one. Enough preamble. Dive in.
Chrissie Hynde has been a rock star for more than fifty years. The Pretenders have not been together quite that long, but Hynde was already making her name as a girl about town and rock-star-in-waiting in London. She has lived the life full-time for all of that period. It is a surprise, then, that she does not fully appreciate the credit that has accrued with that history, and how people still want to hear what she has to say.
Possibly not the snappiest of album titles, but if you know, you know, and it is everything, much more, that it says on the tin. Which is a long winded way of saying party time. Sorry, PARTY TIME! And there won’t be a better party this year, that is for sure, with Valcour Records hoovering up about as stratospheric a line up you could ever imagine, in support this timely celebration of Chenier, the coolest man to ever tote an accordion in the name of rock and roll. And blues. And soul. For that is, loosely, what zydeco is, a defiantly idiosyncratic mixture of all those musical forms, cooked up in the swamps of Louisiana. Often sung in French. Lead instrument accordion.
