Here’s a shocking fact: I’ve been writing about Minnesota music for 27 years. Now here’s a not-especially-shocking opinion: This list of my favorite 25 albums by Minnesota artists is as solid as any list I’ve made since 1998.
Read on with the usual disclaimer in mind, that this is just one 55-year-old straight cis white guy’s list, though that 55-year-old straight cis white guy listens pretty broadly and carefully. Still, as fans of heavy music will never stop pointing out, my breadth has its limits.
As always, your band’s album was No. 26.
But wait, there's more! Scroll all the way down and you'll find a playlist of 100 local songs—well, a playlist of 92 local songs along with eight bonus tracks from artists who aren't on Spotify. (Good for them! I'm looking into an alternative for 2026.)
I won't even pretend this is close to comprehensive. I'm sure I'll remember a dozen songs I should have added as soon as I click "publish," and they're in no particular order. Just set it to random and take it for a spin.
The versatile producer follows 2024’s Acceptance with another three-track album, Dignity, which serves up 24 minutes of spare but not austere electronic expansions that Broder calls “journey techno.” “Surveillance” emits a Morse code of synth that’s layered over with ripples before a house kick drum punches in. From there it lets loose. And that’s probably the least jittery cut here. Unsettled music for unsettled times.
Ali’s preacherly cadence rubs guilty consciences the wrong way, but lyrically he remains as honestly introspective as you could ask of a rap moralist, revisiting past relationships with insight and prickly acceptance. Handling production duties throughout, Ant provides fittingly soulful beats, often with live musicians, all more engaging than his work on the new Atmosphere record, which is better than you want to admit too.
Citric Dummies, Split With Turnstile
When you need a dose of sardonic bad vibes to clear your head, punch in “I Don’t Like Anything,” “I Can’t Relate,” and “I Can’t Stand the Weekend,” a threefer that won’t take up more than five minutes of your life. Yeah, the guys who parodied the Zen Arcade album art are back on their IP-baiting bullshit, and no, Turnstile did not sue. But I dare Drew Ailes to name the next album Disney’s Greatest Hits.
Essjay the Afrocentric Ratchet, A Masterpiece
Ratchet for sure: Essjay loves fucking. More importantly she loves rapping about fucking, and most importantly she’s damn good at rapping about fucking. Afrocentric as well, though she employs that modifier mainly to accentuate that her sexy bits are attached to a brain that’s damn good at storytelling, particularly on the opening track, “Butters,” where a friendship becomes more than that, and “Dick Appt,” where her no-strings fuckbuddy unexpectedly catches feelings.
What if a bunch of noisemakers and rock experimentalists decided to make a pop record? That’s “pop” as in the kind of tuneful guitar songs that have individual instrumental bits just as memorable as the main melody—as bassist Matt Helgeson puts it, “People don’t have bridges enough anymore.” Often when a band cites its influences, they’re either so obvious you wonder why they bother or so beyond their abilities you wanna say "nice try." But here’s one crisply jangly new group that does not mention the Feelies, the Go-Betweens, or Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever in vain.
Gully Boys have been such an integral part of local music for the past seven or so years that you might be surprised to hear that this is their debut full-length album. I sure was—has their 2019 debut, Not So Brave, been memory-holed? But hey, I’m willing to play along, if only because the sound here is so fully realized it’s like meeting the band for the first time. There’s never been much that’s punky about Gully Boys, unless you call any hard rock that moves and doesn’t put on airs “punk,” but their guitar attack has thickened since the addition of Mariah Mercedes made ’em a quartet. And the range of songwriting has grown as well: They taunt a disrespectful bro on “Mother,” ask the safe and propertied “You wanna watch the city burn?” on “Murderapolis,” and as for “Big Boobs”—well, I’ll give you two guesses what that’s about.
Dylan Hicks & Small Screens, Avian Field Recordings
Hicks’s sextet continues to sprawl musically, in directions both planned and improvisational, its style jazzy with an emphasis on the “y”—he’s assembled a great band, and he lets them shine. Lyrics like “Most days the clouds skitter by/Like daytime mice when you’re too tired to shriek” or “A thought you can’t stop thinking is just who you are” stick with you; miniature vignettes about a down-on-his-luck fellow who shouts down Biblical wrath upon midway carnies or a listless Alamo agent lend pathos by association to the instrumentals. A dusk album in the way Astral Weeks is a dusk album, but much cozier as it sails into the quotidian, and it sounded especially good after a recent swing of Dayquil, the most altered my mood gets these days.
This Duluth singer-songwriter, who moved down to Minneapolis this year with help from some Trampled by Turtles prize money, calls her style “tender bubble grunge,” though way back when (before she was born) we’d have just called it alt-rock. As you might expect, the bubble is in her voice, the grunge in the guitars (and, less so, in the drums). The lead single “Ashes” expresses stinging regret without succumbing to torpor, an ideal mood to match a lyric like “My hands are soaked in sorrows and my tongue is soaked in gin.”
This “genre-bending, shape-shifting acid rock collective” (in their own words) has, from what I gather, seven members at the moment, and they celebrated three years of existence with their first album, called Ice Climber, an exuberant collection of heavy and sometimes funky rock with new-wave saxophone and the charismatic Xochi de la Luna declaiming their sometimes wry, sometimes heartfelt musings on top. Among my faves are the danceably skeptical "No Yeah, For Sure,” the fuckup’s lament “Consistently Inconsistent,” and the moving climax “All I Know Is Death,” a litany of Xochi’s dead friends. Please don’t sue them, Nintendo.
Nikii Post is screaming her head off again, and why not? She’s damn good at it. On the title track she rhymes "caught cutting school again" with "done something uncool again," “Petz” defends friends both furry and fleshy, and organized religion and other bastions of authority serve as suitable targets of derision. Musically their dual guitars and lockstep rhythm section stomp, stamp, rage, and race as they see fit. I could go on, but when an album’s 10 songs clock in just under 19 minutes, a guy feels compelled to keep it brief.
What drives Kiss the Tiger is the tension between the group’s meaty no-nonsense bar-band rock and singer Meghan Kreidler’s well-calibrated theatrics. While you can’t get the full Kreidler experience on record, you can hear her increased range of vocal styles, at times edging into well-rounded Debbie Harry territory, though with less distance from her material. The band keeps pace with Kreidler’s bravura, with highlights including the stomper “We Don’t Fight Anymore” (“and I like that”) and the countrified title track, which swings.
Lazerbeak, A Bridge Under The Alley/To Be Tubing/Seeing Friends
EPs are in. I can’t tell you how many musicians I’ve spoken to recently who’ve come to prefer sharing immediate snapshots of their creative process over laboring on a masterwork that they’ve tired of before it’s released. I’m cheating a little by considering the Doomtree producer’s trio of miniatures a single release, but though each has its distinctive mood, these are in clear conversation with one another. In fact, I hear a seasonal progression, from the stirring buds of Bridge to the summery activity of Tubing to the shortening days of Friends. So meditative and calming that if not for all the cumulative details—modulating strings, wordless female voices, synth ostinatos, liquid guitars, the occasional saxophone—it’d pass for ambient.
Makin’ Out, Living in a Glass House
An album rooted in recent tragedy: Bandleader Caitlin Angelica’s boyfriend was August Golden, the DIY rocker murdered at the 2023 Nudieland punk house shooting. Go in with none of that knowledge and the way Angelica sings “I don’t wanna be alive/I don’t wanna die” or “the yearning eats away my youth” will hit home regardless. From the frantic strum and shuffle of guitar-bass-drums to Angelica’s full-throated vocals, the rawness here never feels self-conscious. “I joke this is the only love song I've ever written, which is not entirely true, though it is the only one August was alive to hear,” Angelica writes about the closer, “Sunflower Song,” which she sings with an enthusiasm just barely touched by mourning.
After handily flipping an online diss of his weight into a boast on the title track, the unflappable rapper sets about to show you can put on for your town without overlooking its flaws. He reps Franklin Ave., sure, but also calls out “a whole lotta Diddys in my city” and discusses the incidents that led to him publicly cutting ties with First Avenue in December 2023. (Long story short: Nur-D says he was booked to share the stage with an abuser, and both he and the survivor were ghosted by the venue when he scheduled a meeting with its reps.) Helps as always that he can sing as well as he raps, and that the beats are both fonky and chonky.
Individually, you might know highlife bandleader Obi Original or rapper Mack OC apart from their roles in this Afrodiasporan collective. But gathered together, each member contributes something unique, from the dynamic chops of Sumer and Bakarii to Ch!nwe’s handling of the new-wavey “Apathy.” Stylistically, Breezy2Fresh’s production hews close to a steamy Afrobeats template, whether someone is singing or rapping or soloing, which gives the album a unified sound. And even the skits bring out the members’ personalities rather than disrupting the flow.
Panel, A Great Time to Be an Empath
The title is ironic, as you probably guessed. The death of local pop-punk stalwart Annie Sparrows’s beloved aunt is the central motivating event here, but that’s not the only loss. In fact, “Solid Start” is a kinda rewrite of Jim Carroll’s “People Who Died,” a list that can sadly always be updated. With insistent low-end and revved guitars the norm (aside from a piano ballad about how blessed our pets are not to know about mortality), these songs could be in a race against time. But let Sparrows tell you something about time: ”Time goes by/Time just flies/Then you die.”
Cole Pulice, Land’s End Eternal
Every year I allow myself to sneak in a Minnesota artist who doesn’t live here anymore. Since relocating to Oakland in 2022 with fellow experimental musician Lynn Avery, saxophonist Pulice has been expanding the boundaries of ambient music, and though they don’t play anything as gaudy as a hook, their playing is melodic enough that you can imagine some ambient sticklers finding the distinctiveness distracting. Pulice plays guitar for the first time here, adding pulses and arpeggios and lines, and some of these excursions remind me a little of Jon Hassell—without the exoticism, which is probably a plus.
The most buzzed about jazz combo in town these days made their name by playing rock clubs. Pianist Eli Awada and bassist Beck Madson got together at the U; once they met drummer Colin Mitchell (aka RAWTWHYLAH), the trio was working through standards together and bonding over their love for modern jazz innovators like Robert Glasper, Thundercat, and Kamasi Washington. On this debut, they’re frequently joined by Jovon Williams’s sax and percussion from Evan Espinoza, and you can hear both their innovation and their respect for the basics on a track like “Morning with Monk,” which builds off the pianist’s compositions with raps from rapper EA.
The indie-esteemed Samia Finnerty was an established quantity before she relocated to the Twin Cities, drawn here by collaborators in the Hippo Campus camp. But we’re good soil for her—the tendrils of Samia’s songwriting really tangle themselves into intriguing knots here. Her m.o., typified by album opener and peak, “Bovine Excision” (nasty stuff—just look it up) is to mask a lyrical grimness (e.g., “pickin’ leeches off white underwear”) with stylized vocals and smooth rock. Subject matter generally revolves around the need to complicate relationships for reasons you don’t quite comprehend, along with other frustrating pastimes of restless twentysomethings.
Alan Sparhawk with Trampled by Turtles, Alan Sparhawk with Trampled by Turtles
If last year’s electronically spindled White Roses My God sounded like Alan Sparhawk’s way of representing the immediacy of loss in the wake of Mimi Parker’s death, this collab with his Duluth pals seems concerned with finding structure again, as reflected in more conventional songcraft. Not that the mourning ever ends, but you do eventually achieve some sort of perspective. You gotta, right? There are overwhelming moments here—not just lyrics we hope to never find relatable like “I thought I would never stop screaming your name” and “I thought you'd make it for sure,” but the amassed vocals that power past Sparhawk’s falsetto on “Get Still.” And TBT’s unfussy accompaniment offers an ideal soundtrack for learning to live again.
"Where have all my oldest friendships gone?" wonders Rob Taxpayer in his yearning Weakerthan warble, a poignant line even if you don’t know that this was yet another album partially recorded in memory of August Golden. This partly local outfit thrusts itself into the sort of engaged, earnest anthemry you could build a DIY community on. There are even horns. It’s the kind of band that could (as we used to say) be your life if you run across them at the right time. Or at least get you through a rough patch of that life. For me this year, their June Pilllar Forum gig, a benefit for the Karen Organization of Minnesota, came at exactly the right time.
Any Anita Velveeta fan glancing at the tracklist will recognize titles like “Stealing From Target Is a Twin Cities Pastime” or “Bored of Tinder, Scared of Grindr.” But though you’ve heard ’em live, you’ve never quite heard ’em like this. I hesitate to mention Frank Zappa because he can be a red flag for listeners (me included), but Anita makes something fresh of that potentially pernicious influence. All of her musical loves—brisk punk, sludgy death metal, tweedling video game toons, techno synth slabs—ram into each other here with precision mayhem. And I think I also heard a flute in there somewhere?
Leslie Vincent, Little Black Book
Vincent knows her way around a standard—she tackles a few on her 2023 album About Last Night. But here she stands out as that rarity in contemporary jazz singing: a sharp songwriter. Offering a frisky take on the quiddities of modern love, with cell phones and emails keeping lovers apart far more than connecting them, and the title of “Hannah Always Cries At Ikea” proving self-explanatory. The most poignant love story here takes place between two women who meet over a century ago. Make of that what you will.
Even if you don’t recognize producer/collaborator/sideman Zak Khan’s name, you’ve probably heard music that this local music fixture had a hand in. For this solo effort, he built his own fretless guitar, though, as he told me earlier this year, there was an extended courtship period prior to recording: “I wanted to take some time to get acquainted with the instrument before I was going to give myself the satisfaction of making music with it.” Since this guy knows his way around a studio, Fretless Sex has a panoramic sound you can sink right into. And Khan's flashy guitar work complements his casually suave vocals, not to mention his purr of a falsetto. Or, to put it more directly, if I may quote a comment from critic Michaelngelo Matos, “Wow, dude plays his ass off.”
Yuasa-Exide, Hyper at the Gates of Dawn
Douglas Busson is one busy little noise-pop gremlin. “There’s too many albums, it’s fucked,” he says in the liner notes to a 2025 compilation that picks from the last seven (!) he released. Of the two full-length projects he released this year, I prefer this to the more recent Go To Hell Encyclopaedia Britannica by a hair—how can you argue with song titles like “Bring Me the Head of the Marshall Tucker Band” or “Beatles All the Way Down”? Still, if this tickles your stereocilia, rest assured there’s plenty where that came from. Rhythm guitar so insistent the drums often feel redundant, simple buzzy leads, faux Brit vocals, more tunes than a lot of guitar bands stumble across in their career—GBV fans are gonna think they died and went to 1994.
Bonus (Non-Spotify) Cuts:
Ice Climber, “No Yeah, For Sure”
Mike the Martyr feat. Big Zach, “We Just Love What Your On”
PaviElle French, “Sacrifice”
Full Catholic, “Tilt”
