2025 in Dad Rock

I am perfectly on time with this, which is to say I am late. It’s taken me a while to get my sea legs back, so to speak, and be ready to write and create and make again. Burn out and all that hit me pretty hard at the end of 2025, a long and hard and great year for a thousand reasons, and it's taken me until now to think about the without having a slight panic attack. I had a slight panic attack this morning, telling myself it was time. I will have more, I wouldn’t worry too much about it.

Everyone has made their Top 10, Best Of lists for 2025. Lists that I have read and loved and thought were beautiful reminders of the year, but that practice was not for me. I don’t really remember 2025. Most of it was spent marketing and promoting and travelling and sleeping. My Apple Replay says I listened a lot of Wilco and “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”, which is the most honest memory I can recall. Mostly, I have engaged in comfort when the time was afforded to me. But, that all being said, there were songs and albums that emerged this year that I loved, and I thought rather than a run-of-the-mill top 10 list, I would do my year in dad rock songs.

Dad Rock, for those who have not read my book The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman (available now), or my endless posts about it, is a nothing label attached at random that I have claimed and rebranded. Dad Rock as something more than tired clichés and washed out glory. Dad Rock as a genre of music made by anyone, regardless of gender or genre. To put it succinctly, Dad Rock is someone taking what they have learned, through time and skill and failure, doing their best to impart that knowledge as an act of communal guidance. It’s a light on a dark path shone by someone who has stumbled through it looking for the switch. Dad Rock is the music that gets you there, and these are the songs that delivered me to the end in some way.

“YUHDONTSTOP” - De La Soul

Who knew we would get a new De La record (Cabin in The Sky) this year? Especially a record that grapples with the death of Trugoy the Dove, the void of his absence, and what it means to find reasons to wake up and keep going. This is the start of the playlist for a reason. Hit it, and keep moving ever forward.

“Sad and Beautiful World” - Mavis Staples

Mavis Staples’ new record, a collection of covers that gathers songs from the likes of Tom Waits, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, Frank Ocean, and Sparklehorse (the title track and album title), is a beautiful reimagining of the world through the eyes of a woman who has seen it all. Mavis has seen it, truly seen it, and is still here singing about it. What she does here, taking songs that are so easily dark and morose and finding what might grow in the cracks between them, is nothing short of transcendent. None more legendary than Mavis Staples, and who better to guide the path forward.

“Car Alarm” - Gladie

Alright, cheating a little because I also wrote the bio for the new Gladie record, no Need To Be Lonely, that drops this year. Cheating just a little, but not too much, as I firmly believe Augusta Koch to be one of the all-time greats. Her ability to take anxiety and uncertainty and give it form and rhythm. Gladie finds so much heart and joy in all things, even the hard and sharp corners of the world, and encourages us all to find our path through the darkest days.

“Caught Up in the Past” - Jeff Tweedy

Look, I get it. Apple Replay 2025, I hear you. I just think Jeff Tweedy is a choreographer of the delicate movements through all the malaise and desperate depression. I trust someone I know has felt the floor more than those who act as if they are better than their crumbling feet, and Jeff Tweedy is a man unafraid to sing tender and beautiful words about the way down, and how he gathered himself back up again.

“West End Girl” - Lily Allen

What if Lily Allen rewrote the devestating song about the Grinch to be about what a piece of shit David Harbour was to her? Here she sounds almost eerily calm, relaxed and entered and unrelenting about the terrible end of their relationship. A map drawn of navigating around all the pitfalls and shallow cruelty of lives splintering from each other, that arrives safe and happy enough at the end and encourages all who hear it to follow when needed.

“Hallways” - PUP

As a youth that fell into punk rock, especially the kind of skate punk that would eventually be reimagined as pop punk despite my feelings on the limitations of that term, I am living for this moment where the genre grew up alongside me. There has been a movement to explore not just the self-destructive emotions of the men who dominate the scene, but also the anxious fears, the failures and self-doubts and the rebuilding of the walls of the heart. PUP does this better than most, unafraid to be vulnerable, tender, raw, and riotous all at once.

“Light Mountains All That” - Ratboys

I spent a lot of time getting very into Ratboys this year, their previous record The Window was forever in my AirPods when I had to run even the simplest of errands. I love a song most when I am not quite sure of the truth of it, and here I am sifting through seeking answers, and it ensures I continue to come back with questions. Sometimes, oftentimes, having more questions than answers is how we survive.

“Picture Window” - Japanese Breakfast

If you, like me, suffer from intrusive thoughts, then there is something for you here. The ceaseless stream of needling worries that present all the doomed scenarios of our surrounding lives. It is difficult to love and worry, and occasionally, it’s enough to know we are none of us alone in our struggles.

“Heathcliff” - Snocaps

I needed one thing this year, and that was the return of Allison Crutchfield (Swearin’). I— like so many —love Waxahatchee and the run of records we have received from her lately, but I have been eagerly awaiting her twin sister's return to form. The chorus, when you go down you take me down with you has been running through my head ever since this record dropped, a collaboration between Allison and Katie Crutchfield in a callback to their days together as P.S Eliot.

“Honey” - Laura Stevenson

If there is an architect of yearning, aching pain turned beautiful, it is Laura Stevenson, whose work never lets me feel alone in all of my most tender feelings. Often, a shared burden is enough to keep moving forward, and every so often it is simply that we need to know we are not alone in this fight. Even and especially when the fight is turned inwards. I will never forget the feeling in my bones the first time I heard her sing I am somebody to someone I swear.