DJ Rynk's Best Albums of 2025

The indie musicians of 2025 hear everything and will play anything. Their art helped make sense of a crazy year. Every weekend I was running through Humboldt Park to the soundtrack of another new release—prep work for my morning DJ shift and CHIRP's featured album rotation. Thank you, CHIRP Radio sustainers, for keeping me steeped in music. These albums I kept on replay.

1. Big Ugly by Fust (Dear Life): The Durham, North Carolina, country-folk band hit the road stocked with Southern Gothic ballads. Fuzz-guitar cries and fiddle flights lift the dark small-town vignettes of singer-songwriter Aaron Dowdy. Choice Cut: In the anthem "Spangled" the starry sky over Roanoke, Virginia’s razed Shenandoah Hospital site is a scene for self-medication. RIYL: Now Then by Robbie Fulks (Compass); Send a Prayer My Way by Julien Baker & Torres (Matador)



2. Boleros Psicodélicos II by Adrian Quesada (ATO): Boleros Psicodélicos Dos returns Austin, Texas guitarist Adrian Quesada (Black Pumas, Grupo Fantasma) to the thrilling days of the 1960s Mexican guitar-organ combos that backed torch singers with surf, art-rock and hippie flourishes. Quesada invites collaborators from his original lo-fi 2022 boléro project, plus Caroline Trowbridge on vibes for a fuller sound and co-producer Alex Goose to add dance-floor polish. Choice Cut: Mexican indie folk singer Ed Maverick's "Afuera" dives into a trip-hop undertow. RIYL: Lux by Rosalía (Columbia); Entre Tus Flores by Miramar (Ansonia)



3. Interior Live Oak by Cass McCombs (Domino): Singer-songwriter Cass McCombs returns to his San Fancisco Bay roots for his 11th album, a quietly impressive double LP featuring his original bandmates, guitarist Chris Cohen (Deerhoof) and drummer Jason Quever (Papercuts). They’re a reliable foil for McCombs’ wry character studies. Choice Cut: Despite its claims, “I Never Dream About Trains” lives in a Robyn Hitchcock reverie. RIYL: Noble and Godlike in Ruin by Deerhoof (Joyful Noise); Possession by Ty Segall (Drag City)



4. hooke's law by KeiyaA (XL): South Side Chicago multi-instrumentalist Chakeiya Richmond debuted as Keiya with a 2015 EP, then broke out in the Brooklyn scene as KeiyaA--featured in a 2020 solo LP and in Loraine James' electronica and Nick Hakim's psychedelica. Her concept album frames trauma in physics terms, as the propelling force of a loaded spring. KeiyaA employs tension and release as well, her dense, club-ready production moving beyond gauzy neo-soul. Choice Cut: The dark meditation "devotions" takes surprising turns in tempo. RIYL: The Prophet and The Madman, by Ami Taf Ra (Brainfeeder); Bad Dogs by 81355 (Joyful Noise)



5. Thick Rich and Delicious by Guided by Voices (GBV): The 42nd GBV studio offering is luscious, straight-to-tape guitar rock, dialed to 11. Singer-songwriter Robert Pollard of Dayton, Ohio, mostly lets the hooks do the talking in a Brooklyn studio, amps in overdrive--not that he doesn't get his lyrical licks in. Choice Cut: Pollard was a big baseball player back in Northridge High School, but makes nearby "Oxford Talawanda" his glory-days stand-in; since 2018, the Talawanda Braves call themselves the Talawanda Brave. RIYL: You're Weird Now by Guerilla Toss (Sub Pop); Oscar Bravo Juliett by wht.rbbt.obj (self-released)



6. necronym by Oux (self-released): The art rock duo of Indigo Finamore and Manae Solara Vaughn turn the screws in their album debut. The Chicago musical and life partners build a prog-funk-psych tension that echoes lyrical obsessions with things that dare not speak their name. Choice Cut: For the rocker “Two of Swords," the tarot card for indecision represents a mate’s contradictions. RIYL: Thee Black Boltz by Tunde Adebimpe (Sub Pop); Make 'Em Laugh by Benét (Bayonet)



7. Nested in Tangles by Hannah Frances (Fire Talk): Chicago folksinger-songwriter Hannah Frances takes on big feelings in an expansive prog style on her fourth studio album, recorded in southern Vermont with producer Kevin Copeland (bass, percussion, pedal steel) and Grizzly Bear’s Daniel Rossen (percussion, piano, guitar, cello, vocals) Frances’ Chicago collaborators fill out Brooklyn trombonist Andy Clausen's intricate arrangements. Choice Cut: Rossen treats Frances’ wounds in “The Space Between," a gentle medication on forgiveness. RIYL: Humanhood by The Weather Station (Fat Possum); With Trampled by Turtles by Alan Sparhawk (Sub Pop)



8. Always Been by Craig Finn (Tamarac / Thirty Tigers): Craig Finn’s sixth solo album presents a lyrical deep dive from The Hold Steady frontman, produced by Adam Granduciel and backed by his band The War on Drugs as a looped and layered version of Finn’s rock and soul revue. It’s a concept album from Finn’s familiar place, among people living with bad choices. Most tracks revolve around a single character, Clayton, an itinerant preacher, teacher, waiter and soldier on the run from himself. Choice Cut: The fast rocker “Postcards," with a Sam Fender backing vocal, is a reverse Dr. Seuss fable for adults with few directions left to choose. Oh, the places you’ll never go! RIYL: when i paint my masterpiece by Ada Lea (Saddle Creek); Horror by The Mekons (Fire)



9. Aguas da Amazonia by Third Coast Percussion (Third Coast Percussion): It's a good day when I step outside the CHIRP Radio studio and hear marimba—not a ringtone but the resonant real thing—from Third Coast Percussion's practice space. Twyla Tharp's 2025 ballet Slacktide featured a live TCP performance at the Harris Theater of this Philip Glass score. The instrumentation alone is impressive: a glass marimba, another made from red oak planks, plus sun drum, djembe and tuned PVC pipes. Choice Cut: Connie Volk's flute improvisations flutter above the pulsing currents of "Japurá River." RIYL: A Garden Adorned by loadbang (New Focus); Cereus: Chamber Music by Kay Rhie (New Focus)



10. Yowzers by Ben LaMar Gay (International Anthem): Heard in the Stereolab horn section for 2025's Instant Holograms On Metal Film, Ben LaMar Gay leads his Chicago quartet in proclaiming an ambient/gospel jubilee, joyful even in somber moments. Pianist Matthew Davis, guitarist Will Faber and drummer Tommaso Moretti make deft contributions to Gay's math-jazz compositions and folkloric improvisations, joining in warm call-and-response vocals and employing live and looped bells, diddley bow, ngoni, synths and tuba. Choice Cut: "I am (bells)" glides from soul chant to ringing morning meditation to cheeky strut. RIYL: About Ghosts by Mary Halvorson (Nonesuch); Honey From a Winter Stone by Ambrose Akinmusire (Nonesuch)

This feature was first published on the CHIRP radio blog, as was a much briefer Best Albums of 2024 list.

Legendary producer Boyd's book traces rhythm's global roots

Joe Boyd is not a complete unknown. At the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, when Bob Dylan went electric, Boyd was behind the sound board. The next year, with the British Invasion still raging, he was in London as an A&R assistant for Elektra Records and running a club where Pink Floyd gigged. Boyd went on to produce albums for Chris Blackwell's Island and his own Hannibal label, moving from Nick Drake and Richard Thompson to an increasingly diverse set of Caribbean, Eastern European and African genres.

Connections among these and other musical traditions are the subject of Boyd's latest book, "And the Roots of Rhythm Remain" (Ze Books), now in paperback and on my desk as a bulky Chicago Public Library hardcover.

Boyd writes that the book's genesis was not similarity but contrast between the musical sensibilities of New Orleans and Havana, two traditions with African roots. Still, he seems to find direct links wherever he looks, and at 944 hardcover pages, not much escapes his gaze.

Three inches of ethnomusicology does not make a good beach read, but I've been known to take James Joyce to the lake, so why not? In my first summer as a radio DJ in decades, I'm catching up on a lot of music that escaped my notice in between. While following Boyd, many albums dropped into my crate.

Zulu groove thing

Paul Simon's "Graceland" makes a proper staring point. The album has become a symbol of appropriation, but Boyd notes that Simon's adept South African collaborators profited as well. (Notes from the album's anniversary release also brought out their understanding of Memphis R&B grooves.) Boyd pointedly notes that Ladysmith Black Mambazo was not a voice of the streets but the essence of Zulu establishment.

Then he reaches back to Simon's influences, the Weavers' "Wimoweh" and the Tokens' "The Lion Sleeps Tonight," and their origins in "Mbube," itself urban Johannesburg's 1938 take on provincial Natal falsetto. Each ingredient simmers in the pot. That's the recurring story of rock 70 years after Elvis Presley covered Big Mama Thornton's "Hound Dog," itself a Jerry Lieber-Mike Stoller confection. Along the way, Boyd sets me straight on Hugh Masakela's "Grazing in the Grass," so named for being recorded not with more cowbell, but in a marijuana haze.

Another theme Boyd follows across genres is ethnic music's dangerous honesty, which autocrats fear and cannot co-opt. While he has recorded artists such as Jesus Alemañy and Alfredo Rodríguez from London, his Afro-Cuban chapter relies on memoirs from producer Ned Sublette, promoter Bill Graham and performers in Havana, New York and elsewhere, plus a few travel aquaintances ("Fidel doesn't dance, not even one step," one Cuban tells him).

Blackwell brings Boyd closer to the action for his Jamaican chapter, in which Trenchtown reggae gangsters torch the island's respectable self-image. Boyd shows his tradecraft producing Toots and the Maytals' "Rastaman," swapping a trombone track with Toots Hibbard humming the part in rehearsal.

"For a while in the early seventies, I shared a house in the Hollywood Hills with John Cale," Boyd notes 30+ pages into his chapter on Hindu and Roma influences, backgrounding his interests in the classical connections to raga and rock. This dude was everywhere! So, we learn that Ravi Shankar productively collaborated as a performer with both George Harrison (who later plumbed Shankar archives to produce a box set) and as co-composer with Philip Glass (whose music publishing company shook loose royalties for obscure Shankar ragas).

Rebel rousers

In Boyd's telling, rhythm is often trapped in political crosscurrents. Jazz musicians on U.S. State Department-sponsored tours of Brazil bring bossa nova back with them; via the Incredible String Band, Boyd hears about Tropicália singers Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, whose disinterest in politics did not protect them from being jailed as provocateurs.

Boyd traces nominally white tango to its Argentine, Italian and African origins. Commissars alternately purge and sanitize Eastern European folk, while classical composers draw battle lines over whether to draw from peasant melodies. Boyd's world tour returns to Africa and Fela Kuta, whose home is raided in a local Lagos frenzy over sex, drugs and Afropop. Kuti then declares his compound the "Independent Kalakuta Republic," feeding the post-civil war regime's paranoia.

Roots music triumphs over racism, snobbery and religious purity across the globe; even American white minstrelsy withers and dies when Black entertainers join the circuit, performing in blackface. They energize vaudeville and popular performers of all races. A final chapter, "How we begin to remember," holds for an extra beat on world music, the bins in back of the record store bins where labels like Hannibal fight for space. The relabeled "global" genre artists always seem behind the times and less vital in their countries of origin, Boyd says.

Now, he wonders if drum machines and programmed beats are spreading too deeply into the countryside, thinning the ranks of live musicians. Boyd's fears do not seem well founded; Mississippi juke joints, Kingston DJs, Bronx MCs and Chicago house parties have not killed live music, only spread its joy. Indie "rock" now defies catagories; it's everything, everywhere, all at once. Whatever comes out of the speakers, the sound waves are real, our reactions are spectacular, and the roots of rhythm hold the reason.

Painting a picture of Mom

Catherine Rynkiewicz, 1931-2025

Catie Rynkiewicz in her art studio is surrounded by her work, including a portrait of her husband, Walter.

Every so often, Mom asked when I would start painting again. I had studied art through my freshman year in college, which convinced me that writing was an easier mess to clean up than drafting or painting. But Catie Rynkiewicz adopted art late in life like her mother, Ethyl van Hercke, who was known for watercolors documenting metro Milwaukee's vanishing farmscape. So Catie reasonably could expect me to come back around to art.

Her apartment's art studio overlooked a big expanse of windows with a view of the county zoo. The space seemed too big for one person, especially as her vision failed and she moved in pain. But I've watched the sunrise from her couch, and I know why she wouldn't settle for less.

She did not always have so much space. By the time I turned 10, six of us were bursting out of a Cape Cod on 80th Street in Wauwatosa.

Catie always had a sewing nook, crammed like my man-cave closet of an office. Cousin Peg Lazarchic called Mom days ago, sharing a memory of how much she loved the fancy dresses Mom sewed, altered and remade for her. My brother Bob remembered the cowboy outfits she made for the two of us one Halloween. She had a costume too, as our Indian guide.

Women played all roles in Suburban Woman's Club of Wauwatosa children's theater productions, including "King Midas and the Golden Touch" in 1966. The actors are identified as Mrs. George Price, Mrs. Walter Rynkiewicz and Mrs. Paul Pakalski.

Catie sewed costumes for Suburban Woman’s Club of Wauwatosa children's theater productions, and acted in them as well. She ran her lines with me at age 11 when she played the lead as King Midas—in one scene, peel-me-a-grape orders to a servant. She'd bark her line imperiously, "Don't ask questions, just cut." I'd just giggle.

Catie also was on the Milwaukee Rep auxiliary board, publicizing events and attending costume workshops at regional theater conventions. She chaired the auxiliary one year, hosting one of those conventions and serving on the Rep's board of directors. For all their fundraising focus, she missed the backstage drama.

She had been involved in theater since high school: Granddaaughter Evie, as a Wauwatosa East student costumer, found a photo of Catie's own costumes. At Marquette, Catie's roles included Lavinia in T.S. Eliot's "The Cocktail Party." (The Milwaukee Journal noted her "unusual stage presence for an amateur.") Catie remembered all her roles, so when she said she was trying to remember a play, I assumed she was recalling a dream.

Dad's friend Bob Gorske was with us at her bedside, and said he fell for her in "Minna von Barnhelm," an 18th century comedy. As the maid, Catie delivered the play's memorable lines but found the 1952 production forgettable. Later that year, she was cast in Thornton Wilder's "The Skin of Our Teeth" with Marquette debater Walter Rynkiewicz.

Catie's spring 1953 cast photo from "The Cocktail Party" illustrates her fall engagement in the Milwaukee Journal announcement, "Van Herckes Tell of Troth of Daughter."

Marquette's speech students were wrapped up in both drama and new media, meaning television, and she appreciated when I latched onto this novel internet thing, another exploit with one foot in writing and one in design. And when I was cast in the odd church musical, she was in the audience.

These past days, our family has been reliving scenes like these. We are blessed to have all of you with us, helping us, as we think about Catie's artistic legacy, left for us to pursue. For my part, I still have painting ahead of me.

Catherine Rynkiewicz Obituary and Online Memorial (2025)

Legacy.com | Becker Ritter Funeral Home | Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Gonna be a long walk home

Arenas are not made for rock bands or rock fans.

I followed a 16-hour work day with a trip to Toronto for my last arena show, and two and three rows ahead of me were eight people, all standing. The one directly in my line of sight for the stage was a full head taller, singing and pumping his fist at the stage. Good for him! I just leaned into the people in front of me, who were doing more talking than listening. Soon enough, everyone would be standing.

It was Nov. 6, the day after the U.S. election, and Bruce Springsteen was sending out "a fighting prayer for my country."

• Last night I stood at your doorstep
• Trying to figure out what went wrong
• You just slipped something into my palm and you were gone

"Long Walk Home" opened Springsteen's set. He goes home to visit family, but the diner is boarded up and the residents are "rank strangers." Still, Dad is consoling:

• "It's a beautiful place to be born.
• It just wraps its arms around you,
• Nobody crowds you and nobody goes it alone
•  
• Your flag flyin' over the courthouse
• Means certain things are set in stone.
• Who we are, what we'll do and what we won't"

A concession from the Boss. The American dream is a mirage, yet we dare to dream. It's why we stay in the arena.