Since New Times knows y'all can't afford to paint eggs this year, here's a guide to the most intriguing wax platters of RSD 2025.
File Under: Alt-Rock Midlife, No Crisis
From a 30th anniversary remastered edition of Shudder to Think's Pony Express Record (perhaps, the most iconoclastic album of the Nineties — think torch songs and '70s stadium rock refracted through a prism of very 1990s DC post-hardcore angularity) and a previously unreleased version of John Lyndon's 1978 post-Sex Pistols debut under the Public Image Ltd flag to deluxe reissues of the Dwarves' Sunshine, Lollipops & Rainbows ("Let's Fuck," "Fuck You Up and Get High," and "Fuckhead" is a mixtape trilogy set piece all its own), Belly's subversive, freewheeling revision of its own alt-pop legacy on 1995's King, and Chvrches' now ten-year-old sublime electropop extravaganza Every Open Eye, an embarrassment of riches, this is.
On the third anniversary of his death, we also are blessed with an opportunity to revisit Mark Lanegan's collaboration with ex-Belle & Sebastian vocalist/cellist Isobel Campbell, Keep Me in Mind Sweetheart.
File Under: Start 'Em Early
Sure, there are a slew of Harry Potter soundtracks dropping, but through tough, gumshoe journalism — i.e., talking to my two kids, whose actual gum is on my shoe — there's less excitement for John Williams than the Bluey Burger Dog picture disc and Taylor Swift "Fortnight" 7-inch featuring a pre-nineties-grunge-covers-obsessed Post Malone. (Hope Tay Swif paid him "Them Bones.) I tried to drum up excitement for the 1966 Doctor Who: The Tenth Planet teleplay. "Why no K-pop?" my daughter asks.
File Under: Waxing Nostalgic
There is so much more to love on Eighties Norwegian synthpop A-Ha's Hunting High and Low (1985) than "Take On Me" — see "Love Is Reason," "The Sun Always Shines on T.V.," "The Blue Sky" — and this RSD exclusive collection of 1984 demos for the record demonstrates the breathtaking amount of refinement the songs went through, as well as how solid its bones are.Apparently, just after filming the (sorry, excellent) King Kong remake in the late Seventies, Jeff Bridges recorded a bunch of jam-y, psych-y, vagabond-y songs in Los Angeles featuring his beat-poet-meets-crooner croon and spoken word by Burgess Meredith (Mickey from Rocky, Penguin on the 1960s Batman television show, the bank bookworm who breaks his glasses in the Twilight Zone episode "Time Enough at Last") because, well, because Bridges in an irrepressible stud. Lost to time, but now found and RSD-ified, Slow Magic, 1977-1978 will make a nice counterpoint to this suitable for framing Eighties kitsch Starship's "We Built This City" picture disc no doubt already in hand.
File Under: OST OMG
Though Miami may lean toward the re-released soundtrack to the 1981 exploitation/horror flick Cannibal Ferox (AKA Make Them Die Slowly; AKA the film that "holds the Guinness World Record for being banned in the most countries") based on the track "Jaywalkin' Iguana" alone (I'm sure "Mike Flips Out" and "Castration" are bangers, too), but don't sleep on Brad Fiedel's transportive, sonic ayahuasca score for Wes Craven's 1998 voodoo zombies versus greedy biotech slow burner The Serpent and the Rainbow.Also of note is the aforementioned Shudder to Think soundtrack for First Love, Last Rites, which sees the band backing up a murderer's row of guest vocalists, including Liz Phair, Jeff Buckley, the Cardigans' Nina Persson, and Cheap Trick's Robin Zander.
File Under: Lightning in Round, Flat Bottles
Does Johnny Marr have to give hits from the Smiths on Look Out Live! to get you to pay attention to his undervalued solo work? Yes, of course, he does. As a bonus for being such good boys and girls in the presence of honest-to-goodness greatness, we are also gifted a performance of "Getting Away With It," a track from his 1991 clash-of-titans collaboration with New Order's Bernard Sumner as Electronic. Even belligerent ghouls would call that mandatory listening.Other intriguing picks: Morphine bulldozing through a slinky, sexy, cool "low rock" set circa 1994's landmark Cure for Pain, Throwing Muses captured in 1992 at the legendary New England landmark Club Babyhead (Live in Providence), and Toad the Wet Sprocket doing a victory lap Welcome Home: Live at the Arlington Theatre, Santa Barbara 1992. (You are not prepared for how off-kilter, sly, and even occasionally prog-y the songs from Fear are if all you've heard is "Walk on the Ocean" and "All I Want.")
File Under: Diabolus in Waxica
A bridge between the goregrind of Reek of Putrefaction (1988) and Symphonies of Sickness (1989) and the melodic death metal masterpiece Heartwork (1993), this reissue of the Carcass splatter platter Necroticism—Descanting the Insalubrious (1991) is essential extreme, teasing sharpened, soul-stirring riffs out of maelstroms of noise.It pairs well with the equally influential World Downfall (1989) by Terrorizer, which featured two then-members of Morbid Angel, David Vincent and "Commando" Pete Sandoval, and one future member of Napalm Death, the late Jesse Pintado, and lit the fuse on a fusillade of a million grindcore and power violence bands.
Looking for something heavy but not a jackhammer to the temple? Check out The Eternal Idol (1987), the unduly dismissed first Tony Martin-fronted Black Sabbath record, lost in the war between Ozzy and Dio partisans, or Beast From the East (Live), the unduly dismissed album from Dokken, lost in the war between aging metal fans and their own personal listening histories.
File Under: Noise-a-Palooza
Between Ned's Atomic Dustbin's God Fodder (1991) and Girls Against Boys' Venus Luxure No.1 Baby (1993), there was an early Nineties boomlet of twin-bass guitar attack, but no one came harder or weirder at that dissonant angle than Cop Shoot Cop, as this reissue of the band's 1990 debut Consumer Revolt ably demonstrates.It pairs well with Lou Reed's now half-century-old granddaddy of dissonant label/expectations fuck yous Metal Machine Music and 1-800-MELTDOWN, a rarities comp from now-reactivated Season to Risk. It includes the song the band played in the nightclub scene of Kathryn Bigelow's Ralph-Fiennes-and-Juliette-Lewis-starring film Strange Days that was ultimately too wild to make the official soundtrack alongside Tricky, Lords of Acid, and Prong — an endorsement all its own.
