Noel Gardner caps off his 15th year as our punk and hardcore columnist with a roundup of the 10 best records of 2025, and reviews of 10 more that got away

“Not long now before I can review bands whose members are younger than this column,” I wrote back in summer, implicitly begging to be respected for a 15-year stint writing Noel’s Straight Hedge on this armour-plated music website. Technically I was actually doing so in that review, as one of the listed members of the band is a dog called Sophie, and although most of 2025’s other chosen punk and hardcore content has been less frivolous than this, I have enjoyed time spent with it immensely.

I also hope readers have been at least introduced to music they might not have otherwise encountered, on account of its often very marginal existence, and ideally found inspiration there in something like the same way it inspires me. All of the 20 releases detailed below are great – half of them weren’t featured in NSH until now, not for lack of merit – but the Sublux tape and Traidora LP are two that really have ‘this is why DIY punk is still relevant and worldwide’ status.

On top of this I enjoyed seeing bands including but not limited to Cell Rot, Class, Dead Name, Gag, Hez, Ikhras, Louse, Necron 9, Negative Gears, Puffer, Ritual Error, Rubber, Sex Germs, Soup Activists and Xiao for the first time in 2025, and want to give thanks to the various people who facilitated that. It feels culturally positive out there in precisely the way the wider world does not.

Noel Gardner’s Top 10 Punk Releases Of 2025

This band are a vital part of the Beirut hardcore punk scene: no-one who calls this a dead subculture should be taken seriously and this is why. Their debut tape is awesome raw 80s style thrash with outbreaks of metal and Dischordian groove. They dropped a second EP in September too.

This band are from Devizes, Wiltshire, a town which until 2025 had had the exact same amount of coverage in this column as Beirut. But then came Steatopygous’ demo, teeming as it did with fuzzy DIY powerchord punk and teenage feminist invective. The group also have a second release recently out, featuring re-recorded versions of these three songs plus three more.

“Gordo Blackers, Aussie garage rocker and dungeon synth dabbler, introduced his Steröid alias and released the first documented crossbreeding of egg punk and NWOBHM,” is a sentence I enjoyed writing but would hate to try and explain to a Victorian orphan.

Are this Spanish-language Montreal mob the fastest band in present-day hardcore (using, for the purposes of advancing this claim, the argument that anyone faster must be grind/powerviolence/some form of extreme metal)? It feels distinctly possible on much of this eight-song EP.

Legitimate freak sound from lesser spotted Dubliners whose members have done mean hardcore and wavey indie bands… but scrub their whole history over five songs in less minutes. It’s like Germs live bootlegs meets Coachwhips and 1993-era Harry Pussy.

Apocalyptic crust-curious Cornish death metal that embraces its inexact punk bludgeon side over its slick chugalug one. Do you like Bolt Thrower or Lifeless Dark (who we’ll return to) or Deviated Instinct? Feast on Thoughtseize! Do you like Magic: The Gathering? They do, but it doesn’t matter if you don’t.

Solo blackened Oi! thing from Paris, as shit-fi as it gets and simply life-giving in its pong of death. Lots of 4/4 marching music for blood-drinking ultras plus two somehow-not-out-of-place psychedelic pivots.

Super interesting and distinctive band from Reno, Nevada who base a lot of their aesthetic around old school telephone culture and have an infectious late-70s-forged take on punk rock that spins off towards both hardcore and new wave without contradicting itself.

I listened to the debut Sublux EP at the start of 2025 and I am listening to it at the end of 2025, having listened to it plenty in between. Disorder… shouts for disability justice using skin-peeling cranky-synthed gothic anarcho pogo as a vehicle – what could be better?

Traidora mainwoman Eva Leblanc put the Sublux tape out on her label, shortly before this unchecked shitstorm of a debut LP emerged via old reliable LVEUM. Anyone reading who likes crustpunk/proto-grind/vintage South American HC – and/or the uplifting of trans voices in a country whose public sphere often seems fuelled by spite against them – should strap in immediately.

10 Punk Releases That Got Away

Perth (Australia) punk prangers Cold Meat graced 2025 with their first release in half a decade, and it was titled Cake And Arse Party so I don’t need to waste time convincing you it’s good. It came out at about the same time as the debut tape by Amerol, who feature Ashley Ramsey and Kyle Gleadell, singer and guitarist of Cold Meat respectively. Amerol sound pretty much exactly like Cold Meat writing hardcore songs, to the point where I wonder if they couldn’t have cajoled their other bandmates into doing the honours with these, but to me it makes essentially no difference and it likely shouldn’t to you either. This is a relatively tuneful type of hardcore, though ‘Crossfire’ has something approaching a mosh part and ‘A Building’ thrashes for all its 45 seconds.

Think this might be my favourite Oi! release of the year, certainly by anyone new to me. An Slua are from Galway and Sure Look It is their debut LP, following a 7-inch and a four-band compilation jobby. Properly wicked tunesmiths, they tend towards the more melodic, brisk-paced end of the genre, with much here for Leatherface or Stiff Little Fingers fans to bite down on. At least as important is the assurance that An Slua are extremely fucking unambiguous lefties and transmit this through their lyrics with sagacity and well-selected phrases. “We went from Markievicz to these bags of piss,” goes one of the first lines on a record that goes on to turn its ire on landlordism and 2020s style fascism before calling (in Irish) for a free Palestine.

French rock music sung in English is relatively uncommon, I suspect because the country does a more thorough job than most of stigmatising the language’s use, and punk is no exception to that. Gutter, from Lille, are giving it a punt however, with their debut album Glitch trading in some dark, sometimes apocalyptic, occasionally histrionic imagery set to hardcore that ranges from midpaced and rocking to fast and crazed. ‘Evicted’ opens the record with some atmospheric horns before ramping up to near-crossover tempo, and later there’s hints of Motörcrust, the Exploited, maybe Rich Kids On LSD and, usefully, all the hooks you need to get away with something like this.

This website bigged up Portugal’s Lovers & Lollypops label just the other day in feature form, and rightly so – but their sound palette, though varied, has rarely had much contact with boisterous hardcore punk. That’s changed with this six-song 7-inch from Ideal Victim, who come from Porto as do L&L. The four-piece have cited UK82, surf punk and Sweden’s Vidro as influences on where they’ve ended up circa Rage Letters, and you can hone in on any of those and get their point; I also think their combo of peppy melody and spookcore guitar tone would have done a fine old job in the 80s SoCal scene, where bands like Sin 34 trod the boards.

This came out right at the end of 2024, if we’re going to be calendar cops, and was also reviewed in tQ’s first metal column of this year, but I have waited nearly all year to add my two’pennorth on this scabrous Mad Max metalpunk motherload so get behind me! A twin-guitar five-piece from Boston featuring hardy perennials of the city’s hardcore scene, Lifeless Dark is very obviously a case of people making the exact ultra-niche music of their aural fantasies, and it’s equally obviously a lot of other people’s as well. On this, their debut LP following a 2018 demo tape, they do seven-minute Sacrilege/Celtic Frost sluggers and three-minute Slayer frashers and the guitar tone is just unreal the whole time, a sheer cliff face stretching into the ozone.

French label Croux, which also released the Fleckentarn album gibbered about upcolumn, likes itself a bit of black metal/punk interzone grot, as demonstrated by this cassette by Portugal’s Somatic Anxiety. They’re not exactly inveterate self-publicists, on this evidence, but founder and vocalist Lykomania is nevertheless pretty upfront about Glass Prison being influenced by her emigration from Brazil, neurodivergence, depression and patriarchy. Her vocals are yobbish and perhaps Somatic Anxiety’s most hardcore-coded element, though I could envisage this coming out on the Youth Attack label vividly enough, and her two bandmates here clang and clout like primo Bone Awl, while also adding a healthily thick layer of goth that’s especially unmissable on ‘With Backs Turned’.

This column doesn’t really check for a lot of stuff that falls under the banner of ‘melodic hardcore’; looking back, when the term comes up in Straight Hedge it tends to be a case of bands landing on the style almost by accident. Stupid World are right on the melodic hardcore money though, even if I’ve been hipped to them via the members’ other groups who do not sound like that. Their members are dotted around England, with vocalist Harriet Elder taking time out from her frontperson role in Bristol’s Gimic. Her singing style on this four-song debut tape is fractionally more gravelly, tweaked to suit her bandmates’ pacey combo of rhythmic downstroking, yelled backup vox and drums that sound born to burst out a boombox at the skatepark.

Of all the parts of the UK whose bands feature in here, the most satisfying ones are the relatively remote, not especially fashionable or prosperous towns whose DIY punk scene is the result of a few people going out of their way to make one happen. Shrewsbury is one such town, and Sweet Fantasy, whose six-song demo came out in September, are something like the sixth act partly or wholly from there to be acknowledged here, with members also involved in gig collective One Hand Clapping and playing in weirdo HC ensemble Weo. As for this tape, it’s bob-on midpaced hardcore with atonal soloing, a guitarist with swirly psych tendencies and a vociferous vocalist who, it is claimed, was recruited on her ability to lipsync to the Spice Girls.

I was too young to be into emotional hardcore when it was really pulling up trees, and am now too old to pay much attention to what now seems to get called ‘skramz’. But I was around in the mid-2000s for a pretty solid UK emo scene, and so were most of Tethered, who on this debut LP both keep the genre flame burning and do something a bit different with the basic ingredients. Arrangements are chaotic and full-throttle, Pablo Otero’s guitar tone going right through you in the best way; there’s also a pummelling 90s noise rock feel, undergirded by Rose Whittaker’s caustic vocal delivery, and lyrics which employ poetic imagery while most often being clear about their targets.

The character behind this alias, an Austrian named Jannis Meindlhumer, has a background in marginal black metal entities like Weathered Crest and Brånd, which will have been his pathway to having this tape album released by London metal label/shop Crypt Of The Wizard. I’m not saying those guys don’t earnestly dig Entropy, by any means, but I am saying it is not a metal album, rather one from the very fringes of psychedelic punk primitivism. If you like Raspberry Bulbs or Afflicted Man or Ceramic Hobs or pre-Vibracathedral Orchestra band Lizgizzad or The Hospitals you will probably be down to meet Total Revolt Of All Limbs on its own patch, but all that is really underselling how deranged Meindlhumer comes off here.