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Karma Rivera, Priceless
Most of the songs on Karma Rivera’s full-length debut album are singles the rapper has released over the years, but it’s the new songs that stitch her concept together, from the shameless earworm of a title track to “Use to Be Love,” which looks back on a past relationship with both fondness and critical honesty. Rivera’s blend of hip-hop beats, acoustic guitar, song and rap feels like a fresh new Pacific Northwest sound looking forward to 2030. ANDREW JANKOWSKI.
quickly, quickly, I Heard That Noise
Far removed from his beatmaker days, Graham Jonson embraces a different sense of “lo-fi,” evoking artists like the Microphones who didn’t need the best setup to use the studio like an instrument. Leaning into the years of accumulated bric-a-brac in his North Portland studio, the 25-year-old’s toy-box approach is so evocative that when he describes a lover (or child? parent?) as a “harp inside a basement,” we instantly understand he’s also describing his own sound. DANIEL BROMFIELD.
Vylet Pony, Love & Ponystep
If you have any doubt a dubstep-hyperpop album following the travails of fictional characters derived from the My Little Pony universe could be one of the best releases of the year, you’re not paying enough attention. Internet subcultures provide places for isolated kids with wild dreams to flourish, especially queer kids who might not easily find real-life community in their immediate environment. Love & Ponystep is a love letter to those spaces from Zelda Trixie Lulamoon, a Portland producer with the astonishing ability to crank out consistently interesting hour-and-a-half-plus albums on a regular basis. DANIEL BROMFIELD.
Strategy, A Cooler World
The late ’90s saw an uptick of interest in “Arctic ambient,” which proceeded in blissful ignorance of climate change as producers attempted to capture the slow majesty of polar ice through sound. Portland prankster Paul Dickow loves to burrow into niche genres like these. Armed with little more than a sampler, he dishes up his own take on Arctic ambient: a prayer for a cooler world, rendered in thick synth chords that suggest the place where the colors of the northern lights meet the gases seeping out of the permafrost. DANIEL BROMFIELD.
Jane Remover, Revengeseekerz
This album feels like a bus ride from the darkest depths of cyberspace and into the sleaziest club in town. The driver is Jane Remover, veteran of the digital underground and globe trotter of genre. Revengeseekerz is Jane’s bold take on trap, feeding its conventions into some bitcrushed nightmare. Cursed 808s and agitated synths teleport across progressive tracks that draw you in with undeniable danceability, then beautifully decay into a glitchy hellscape. NASH BENNETT.
Coroner, Dissonance Theory
After 15 years of pruning and deliberation, Swiss technical thrash band Coroner finally got off the pot and delivered their long-promised reunion album. Most records with such a long gestation period fail to match expectations; Dissonance Theory is a rare exception. These 10 carefully wrought tracks of crystalline shredding workouts (interspersed with ominous interludes) are imbued with groove and emotion—both rare for the genre. An endlessly listenable dark and intense modern masterpiece and my favorite metal album of 2025. NATHAN CARSON.
Kassi Valazza, From Newman Street
Folk songstress Kassi Valazza may have decamped from Portland to New Orleans to replenish her creative juices with a chance of scenery, but you would hardly know it. Valazza still pops up frequently in our fair city, whether on tour or playing surprise gigs at longtime haunts like the Laurelthirst. To make her spellbinding new album, she teamed up with a handful of Portland players and even recorded here. The result finds her expanding her rich psych-folk sounds into more cosmically twangified territory. Even the album title is a nod to Valazza’s old apartment, making this collection of tunes feel like a melancholy goodbye to this place she called home. NEIL FERGUSON.
Dean Johnson, I Hope We Can Still Be Friends
Though he calls Seattle home, folk crooner Dean Johnson is practically an honorary Portlander: He’s played some of his most formative shows here. With his warm, soft-spoken songs, Johnson has been winning over increasingly larger audiences here, often backed by local players. I Hope We Can Still Be Friends is the kind of album that makes you immediately want to throw it on vinyl and sink into a plush couch to let it embrace you like a warm cup of tea. Johnson’s tranquil, occasionally ethereal voice is in fine form as he sings songs full of what he describes as “division, estrangement, and unpleasant endings.” NEIL FERGUSON.
Wednesday, Bleeds
I’ve been straight huffing the fumes of this explosive album all fall. Bleeds is tactile and textured, a three-dimensional sound of rock, jam-band pockets and ’90s sloppy grit (think Pinkerton with less jagged sexual undertones). It’s a world, too, laying out life on fringes, the raw parts of small-town living—the drowned high school athlete, the friend with dentures from a hit in the face with a baseball bat, biking home drunk on Four Loko. On “Townies” Karly Hartzman sings, “Catchin’ up with the townies…The ghosts of them surround me”; the sonics are breezy and alt-rocky, getting a little more stormy with each arriving chorus. By the last one, it’s become thunderous and eruptive as Hartzman’s yell rains down. What rises from the decay is delectable. ROBIN BACIOR.
The Cosmic Tones Research Trio (self-titled)
The album landed in October, but in some ways discovering it at the turn of the solstice feels apt, perfect even. The Portland trio’s self-titled debut is part cosmic meditation, part jazz exploration in the wheelhouse of Alice Coltrane’s divine, experimental spirit. It’s also its own simple thing, songs both curious and self-contained in their peace. On “The Sacred Garden,” the cello extends like a stretched horizon while the dappled piano tips over the line. It’s a sound akin to rare winter sun—soft and potent, a light that taps into something unknown and hopeful, something you want to get real close to. ROBIN BACIOR.
