Before we plunge too deeply into the excitements of 2026, it feels as good a time as any to quickly review what was an absolutely cracking year of new releases.  I’m not a big one for ranking music, so think of this more as a roughly chronological look back at ten records that shaped 2025 for me personally.

The year kicked off in utterly rollicking style with Australienation (Drunken Sailor / Televised Suicide) from Punter.  I’d really enjoyed the band’s self-titled 2023 debut, but it hadn’t quite prepared me for the raucous brilliance of this follow-up.  The bracing hardcore punk base and viciously acerbic lyrics are still firmly in place, yet are now intertwined with a whirlwind of everything from bagpipes to Hammond organs, together with some truly terrific ‘oohing’.  It feels absolutely instinctual and never fails to invigorate, anger and humour in perfect synch.

This instinctually is a trait shared with the debut album from Siyahkal, Days Of Smoke And Ash / روزای دود و خاکستر (Static Shock).  The album’s stomping rhythms and fierce metallic-tinged, psychedelia smeared riffage are overlain with intensely rhythmic, semi-shouted Farsi incantations that challenge the theocratic oppression of Iran as well as the West’s often patronising attitudes to the country.  The result is as euphoric as it is confrontational, as anyone who caught them on their UK tour in November can testify.

Meanwhile, Feel It Records once again treated us to a stellar set of releases, my personal favourite being Promiscuous Genes from Kilynn Lunsford.  It is an album rich in unexpected influences that Lunsford’s mercurially shapeshifting vocals bind into an febrile, cohesive whole.  It is impetuous as it is inventive as dissonant dance beats, flaring noise punk, and a contagious pop sensibility are honed with a rare flair and laced with a notably combative spirit.

Habak then brought a rather more disciplined energy to bear with their return on Mil Orquídeas En Medio Del Desierto (Alerta Antifascista / Persistent Vision).  The band continue to ferment a tension ratcheting balance between cathartic, melodic crust eruptions and shimmering, reflective instrumental passages.  Meanwhile, the hauntingly evocative, bleakly poetical lyrics are juxta posed with harrowingly harsh vocals.  Be sure to catch one of their UK dates in April if you can.

The middle part of the part year was defined by three releases rooted in the traditions of anarcho-punk.  First up, Bad Breeding returned in crushing style with a new 7-inch, Blood Manifest (Standard Process).  It carried on exactly where the singularly savagery of 2024’s Contempt left off.  Both their metallic discordance and unflinching lyrical challenge are evident in abundance.  Never more so than on the stunning, ominously sludge-mired closer, Competition For Existence, which also proved a highlight of the band’s two barnstorming London shows at The Lexington and New River Studios.

Then, we had the welcome return of Kaleidoscope with Cities Of Fear (La Vida Es Un Mus) after a five year hiatus concentrating on projects such as Tower 7 and Straw Man Army.  Parallels with the latter are not hard to find, not least in the sharply observed, sardonically rhythmic vocals and their distinctive reimagining of their respective anarcho-punk influences.  Yet Kaleidoscope is, perhaps, a more uncompromising interpretation – their delivery is more raw, less mannered, the lyrical narrative as compelling, the underlying fury even more palpable.  It works a treat.

Next, Barren? arrived with, perhaps, the more classical interpretation of the three with Once Upon A Death…Our National Industry (Symphony Of Destruction / Les Chœurs De L’ennui) and it is an absolute belter. Mid-paced, densely layered and interwoven with a more contemporary post-punk melancholy, while the agitated vocals revel in a certain gothic drama as they passionately deconstruct our broken economic system and collective forgetting of colonial legacies.

The pace did not drop one jot as we entered the back end of the year.  We had the thrillingly unexpected return of Catharsis with their first release in over 20 years, Hope Against Hope (Refuse Records).  And they achieved that most challenging of balances – an album that was still grounded in their trademark bleakly menacing, crust fuelled metallic hardcore, yet one that also progressed it with arresting ambition and visceral intent.  This intensity is matched by their thought-provoking exploration of what it means to have hope in a world increasingly shorn of that very emotion.

Ambition is also a defining characteristic of Why Does Paradise Begin In Hell? (Toxic State) from Haram.  It sees the band take their rhythmically swirling hardcore in ever more expansive directions, without diluting its fundamental ferocity.  Sinuous Middle Eastern melodies and chanted Arabic vocals are braided ever more intrinsically into the barrage as Haram continue to pose uncomfortable questions throughout an album of striking vitality.

The year closed with pleasures of a rather more lo-fi nature with the second album from Puppet Wipes, Live Inside (Siltbreeze).  An unashamedly scrappy aesthetic and an unbridled desire to experiment are at the very heart of this restlessly mutating release.  Beguiling melodies and dread inducing lullabies are melded together with scratchy guitars, flaring electronics, and ragged percussion.  As jaunty as it is unsettling, it insidiously works its spell.

So, there you have it, a year in ten records, and some very fine ones at that.