Trendy New Bands for 2025 (May 2025)
I was there.
We all know that feeling; the sick, sick thrill. Knowing you are ahead of the curve, in at the ground floor, there at the very beginning. “I was there!” you tell your friends. “I’ve actually known about them for a while”, you smugly tell your colleague over lunch. “I prefer their early stuff, their spark has gone” you inform a stranger, dourly, unprompted, unsolicited. There is nothing like it.
There is nothing like “getting into” a band whilst they’re still in their early days. The origins of this feeling are, by and large, incredibly pathetic. Fundamentally, it does not matter when you start listening to a band. What matters is that they sound good in your ears, and make you feel something or other at some point. As is so often the case, competition ruins everything.
But still. Still. Maybe it's not all bad. There is something nice about seeing a band in their earliest form, full of beans, not ground down by either being too disconnected or too involved in the musical machine. They normally look happy like they’re enjoying themselves, and if they’re not, they’re probably trying out something as part of their search for an identity - and who wasn’t been there. You get to visit small weird venues, backrooms of pubs, promoted as “the sound twenty-twenty whatever”. It's basically that same joy of finding some new music that you like, except with the secret giddiness of knowing that no one else you know knows about them. Heheheeheheh!!! Less than 10,000 plays on Spotify!!! Yesssssss!!!!
It’s also the inconsequentiality (word?) of the clean state of a new band. I know nothing about them, so there’s nothing to cloud my judgement, and it's perfectly possible that I’ll never see or listen to them ever again. They might be your new favourite band, a flight of fancy, or the worst thing you’ve ever seen. They might go onto play soulless gigs at the O2, a middling career of a mid-afternoon act on the second/third stage at Glastonbury, or they’ll never play again. It doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter.
These are some songs of bands that are currently making me feel that way, or at least did recently.
Play the jingle!
Dogs in the Sun - Adult DVD
Every January, The Lexington near Angel tube station in London does a cool series of gigs called the Five Day Forecast. Every night for one week, they put on gigs featuring some young, hip “up-and-comers” who some white guys who work for a promotion company think are hot stuff. It might as well be called “Watch Out for These Guys!”, and is an absolute catnip to gimps like me. It's just a good idea, and also gives me the excuse to go to my favourite pub in London.
This year, I had the pleasure of seeing Adult DVD headline on Monday night, who did a smashing job. They did partially profit from an extremely underwhelming band that came before them. who had the undesirable combination of being not very good and also quite smug. The shit band were what might be described as “brooding”, and took themselves quite seriously. As previously stated, I’m all for bands exploring different stage personas at this juncture in their lives. However, the lead singer of this band concluded their set by leaning over the crowd in his leather trousers, delivering a quite long soliloquy of spoken word not quite charismatic enough to be called performance poetry, whilst his other band members just stood there, before all walking off the stage to a smattering of polite applause. Not for me, Clive.
So thank fuck that Adult DVD came along and absolutely smashed it out the park. There’s a lot to like. Initially, I quite liked just looking at them, the lads from Leeds. There are six of them, so it's always fun when that many people have to cram into a small stage. Given they’re all white men from Leeds, I thought they had a great relative diversity of image. One guy was wearing a beanie and baggy jeans that had a sort of cobweb pattern on them. One guy looks like the manager of a trendy microbrewery. One guy has a neck tattoo. There was one guy who could have been anywhere between 20 and 40 years old.
Also, they sounded great. It's a quite synthy experience, what I would describe as a mix between Working Men’s Club and Yard Act. Dogs in the Sun is an incredibly catchy little banger, with this little riff at the start of the song that the band accurately described on stage as sounding a bit like the sort of song you would hear whilst playing FIFA. Indeed, this little riff elicited a quite unusual reaction in the crowd. Normally at these gigs, it's full of middle aged blokes in trilby hats that like 6Music but don’t know any of thsongs that well, so - whilst there is a lot of positive vibes and support in the crowd - there isn’t a lot of energy or movement. A lot of head bobbing. However, when Dogs in the Sun came on, people were jumping up and down, chanting along with the riff. Standing off to the side observing this phenomenon, there was a beautiful moment where I looked at the band and spotted this almost bemused smile on their face, like this had never happened to them before. And it's quite possible it hadn’t - they had made it.
The best bit was that they just looked like they were having a really nice time. They looked very chilled out, comfortable, not over the top, doing whatever it is that you do when you play a synth. Their EP, Next Day Shipping, is wall-to-wall bangers. I’m going to see them again very soon, and coaxed some friends into going by literally calling them “the sound of 2025”.
Bunto - Formal Sppeedwear
Modern bands these days do this quite annoying thing where they intentionally misspell their name to make it look like a typo, when in fact it's not. There is a fantastic band that I like called Legss, and now there Formal Sppeedwear. In fact, the general stylisation of band names and songs I find quite tedious, often choosing either all caps or no caps, like it makes a difference.
Despite this rather large hurdle, I have managed to be the bigger man, look past this heinous crime to spelling and enjoy some of the music of Formal Sppeedwear. I think I came across them as they were due to support fellow Manchester band W.H Lung, who I was supposed to see in Brighton with my dad in February, before I tragically ended up falling to illness.
But this Bunto track I really dig. With the singer’s David Byrne-esque overdramatised squeal, they sound kind of weird; sort of slightly unnerving but also fun. They remind me a bit of Ought in that sense, for those of you who have listened to them; they’ve got the same openly-pretentious–but-its-fine vibe I think.
Medo - Aunty Freeda
Full disclosure: Aunty Freeda is a Music Maggot nepo-band. Well, sort of. I haven’t given birth to any of the members, so it can’t literally be a nepo-band, but I do sort of know the singer and driving force of the band, a woman called Anna, in the loosest possible sense. It’s a bit onerous to explain, so I’ll try detail in one sentence: Anna and her mother Lizzy are family friends of my friend Sam, and when Sam, myself and some friends went to Georgia on holiday in 2019, Lizzy (who is Georgian), Anna and her sister were also there and they showed us round a bit, including taking us to the Stalin museum and invited us to the grandma’s house in this Tbilisi tower block for a lovely dinner, where the grandma absolutely schooled our friend Joe at backgammon, but that actually is in no way shameful because this woman was amazing at backgammon.
Anyway, enough context - Aunty Freeda! In sum, they are great. I’m now going to refer to when I went to see Aunty Freeda a couple of weeks ago at a venue very conveniently near to my flat. A five-piece from Leeds, they are an outrageously talented, confident and charismatic bunch. Anna has got this Kate Bush vibe with her voice (but less overwhelming for those of you who don’t like Kate Bush), and gave us everything from jerky, off-beat, almost circus-like rhythms to more gentle piano ballads. Medo, one of only two songs on Spotify (yessss!!!!!!!), falls under the latter, and is just lovely.
I went with my wife (Borat voice) Caroline and we both came out feeling very enthusiastic. As I said at the start, it's just great to see young people enjoying themselves and doing something they’re all so obviously brilliant at, and managing to find a niche that sounds different to most other stuff. I appreciate this is a kind of old-person thing to say, but what can I say: I like seeing people happy.
I’ve Never Met Anyone I Thought I Could Really Love - Westside Cowboy
Now, speaking of my personal sound of 2025, I’ve Never Met Anyone I Thought I Could Really Love is truly it. I became vaguely aware of them via the Instagrams of the wonderful band Personal Trainer, who had Westside Cowboy support them at a few of their gigs earlier this year. I then actually listened to them on a playlist of all the bands playing at Green Man festival in August, where they could be found second from the bottom.
And honestly, honestly. Sometimes you listen to a song and it just instantly hits you, and I couldn’t stop listening to it for about a week. I’d say this is relatively rare, for me at least. Often you have to let a song weedle its way into you, listen to it a few times to work out what they’re doing, why it's good, hear all the extra things you didn’t hear on the previous times. No need for this song though, jeez. It's just an absolutely immaculate guitar song. There is something about the title that I quite like, something incredibly classic love song about it that you can look back on and remember, “I remember when I felt like that! It's actually kind of stupid because you’re like 21 years old so there’s really no need to worry about these sorts of feelings, but I can understand it probably seems like that at the time! Don’t worry, it gets better, you’ll work it out!”.
Caroline (my wife!) and I went to see them at the magnificent Brixton venue The Windmill last month, and it was predictably fabulous. There is already a bit of “hype” around them I think (I only managed to get tickets off the waiting list) so get in there whilst you can and store up that future smug music chat ammo.
Patchwork - Otala
This is a band that I could have seen but didn’t whilst doing a support gig for Blue Bendy in February, but Sam and I took too long after the Turkish Communist cafe we wanted to go to was closed and we took too long eating some Vietnamese food. But I’m glad I remembered the name, as they’ve got a bit of something about them.
And let me tell you what that something is: they sound quite a lot like Black Country, New Road, for those of you that are familiar. Specifically, they sound like the first two BCNR albums before the singer left, which I am massively nostalgic for (I won’t go into this now, but it’s just not the same without him!). To such an extent, I can’t do anything but compare the two. The singer has a very similar mental breakdown-style voice, their songs veer between lots of different styles and speeds, there is a bit of brass in there, and it's just quite good. Possibly a bit more jazzier vibes than BCNR? I dunno, who knows. Go and have a listen and see what you think.
I remember there was a band called Dog is Dead back in the day, who were ripping off Bombay Bicycle Club to such an extent I found it supremely irrationally irritating. Time will tell whether the obvious similarity stands the test of time, or becomes a bit annoying.